When we first moved to our home in Ayrshire the back garden was basically a small field with no notable features. For years we kept it that way, thinking that made it a better playground for Beanie and Biggles, and as youngsters they certainly did lots of playing in it.

I’m not exactly sure what was going on in the next photo but let’s assume it wasn’t anything weird and just move on…

Anyway, the point is that the lockdowns forced on us by the government changed our thinking about the garden, and since then we’ve been filling it with things like fruit trees, raised beds for growing our own veg, and a couple of areas where the grass can grow longer and wild meadow flowers can flourish.

Now we’ve added this thing:

..which once cut, assembled and painted turned into this:

As we planned each project I entertained the worry that we were taking valuable space away from Beanie & Biggles, but now it’s all in place I think the result is a net gain for the pups because their garden has become that much more interesting. They still have space to play – though as older Beagles they don’t do that so much unless I’m throwing a ball for them to fetch – but all these new elements have given them more places to investigate, places to hide when we’re trying to make sure that no-one has somehow gone AWOL, and places to lay poo traps.

They’ll never notice me under here. First they’ll get worried that I’m missing, then they’ll give me extra treats.

OK, so which one of us is going to chew the hose?

I just dropped one directly under Dad’s pullup frame, Beanie! He’s gonna love it when he treads on it!

There certainly have been plenty of poo traps. Both our furries have hit all the high traffic areas, causing smelly shoes and smelly wheelbarrow tyres, but I think the best work has been done by Biggles. One day to get some extra growth going in our wildflower area Susan bought some “seed bombs” – little brown nuggets of earth and seed to drop on bare patches of the lawn. We started out with 30 of them, but a few visits from The Biggly Boy we had more. I’m pretty sure Susan spent the next few days carefully watering some of his seed bombs! Regardless there should be an explosion of color over the next month or so and I’m looking forward to getting shots of the pupsters against it.

If Beanie and Biggles ever do feel the the loss of wide open garden space, they’ve still got plenty of space on our local beach. We’ve had a fantastic run of weather recently during which some pandemic lockdown restrictions were eased, but we’ve still had no problem getting large stretches of sand and sea to ourselves.

Despite having all these facilities at her disposal, Beanie regularly complains that conditions are barely adequate for a Beagle of her standing; she sometimes has to repeat her requests for a blankie and has to remind me whenever tea is running late. Susan counters these claims of hardship by saying that our two must be the luckiest, most pampered Beagles on the planet. I hope Susan’s right, because that is absolutely the way it should be for a furry princess and her pesky brother.

I’ve never been interested in the big annual award ceremonies. I couldn’t tell you when the Oscars or the various Nobel prizes are handed out, let alone who won them, but I’m pretty sure there’s a national award for Naughtiest Beagle coming soon, because Beanie & Biggles have been pulling out all the stops to win it.

I’d say that Beanie was in pole position earlier in the month. She pulled multiple disappearing acts in the garden and in the house, but by far the worst was on the beach.

Mindful of the recent increase in dog theft, I’ve been keeping a very close eye on the dynamic duo during the off-lead section of our beach runs together. I’ve become quite adept at jogging backwards so that I can keep them in view if they’re dawdling, and any time a substantial gap opens up between us I always raise my speed or come to a dead stop – whatever it takes to close it. Despite this, little Ninja Beanie managed to vanish one morning in between my frequent checks. One minute she was there, digging up old sand-covered poos to eat or roll on (as appropriate) and the next she was gone. I asked Biggles where she was but he seemed equally clueless, stopping in his tracks to scan the long line of dunes behind us. I called her, reminding her that I was in possession of multiple hotdog slices, but she failed to reappear. I fed some of those hotdog slices to Biggles and gave a loud commentary about just how tasty they were, but still she didn’t pop back into sight. I quickly scrambled up one of the dunes to gain a view over the golf course that runs parallel to the beach, but there was no white-tipped tail poking up above the border grass. Then I looked backed down at the beach, and there she was, standing alongside Biggles with a quizzical expression on her face that said “What on earth are you doing Dad? I’m right here”. How she managed to elude me remains a mystery, but my running watch recorded a peek heart rate right around that time.

I’m sure my heart rate peaked again the next morning when I opened Beanie’s crate but she failed to emerge. I prodded her to make sure was OK but still there was no response. Only when a I reached in and tried to extract her did she finally shows signs of life. To be fair that particular incident may have been a deserved punishment for my criminal actions the previous evening. As the Beagle Book of Law clearly states: “when a person finishes a bag of Doritos, that bag should be given to the most beautiful houndlet in the room and definitely not to the houndlet’s pesky brother, even if he does happen to be lying on his back, showing off his tummy and his unmentionables”.

Additionally rips have appeared in some of the fleeces and nets covering the raised beds in our garden, and every once in a while I’ve spotted the little furry vandal who caused them making a hasty departure from crime scene. Yep, Beanie again. And on the day I took our wheelbarrow to the nearby farm to get a serving of horse manure, that same little girl became so obsessed with the leftovers  in the barrow that she overturned it, almost managing to crush herself in the process.

With Beanie apparently so far ahead in the naughty ratings, you might be thinking that Biggles would have to be do something really big to catch up, but actually all he needed was something rather small; small, but disgusting. Yep you guessed it: he left a poop in our bed again.

On the morning of the inappropriate jobby I opened the crates to allow the woofers into our bed for a bit of snuggle time. As always Biggles got into my side, Beanie got into Susan’s side, and a few minutes later both of us were forced out by the ancient Beagle martial art of Pushing Paws. Susan went for a morning cuppa while I went for my shower, and on my return I peeled back the covers to check if any furry people were still in bed. They weren’t, but something else was. It wasn’t a full on non-chocolate log so much as a decapitated turtle head, but regardless it had no business being there. Given that it was on my side of the bed, positioned exactly where his lordship’s little white bottom had been, there was no doubt about who had produced it. The real question was: why?

We’ve come up with various theories to explain the bed poop. Maybe it was an overly exuberant fart that pushed out more than just gas – we’ve all been there, right? Maybe it was Biggles’ symbolic way of telling us he was feeling a off-color; after all, he’s surely well used to me struggling out of bed and announcing to the world “wow, I  really feel like crap this morning”. My favorite theory however comes from a nature program we saw a I while back about Pandas: apparently mother Pandas routinely pat their baby’s bottom to help it poo. What’s that got to do with Biggles I hear you ask? Well Susan often jokes that when Biggles was a little angel about to be born, he got confused and took a baby Panda suit instead of a Beagle birthday suit, and that’s why he’s mostly white with two big black spots. And come to think of it, I did pat his bum when he got into bed that morning…

It’s been a couple of weeks or so since Beanie had her dental work and I have to say she’s been a very perky little girl every day since. That said, Biggles has also been a very perky little boy so it could just be the spring weather that’s charged their batteries. Regardless, they’ve both been especially playful and pesky, getting into everything in ways that would put very much younger dogs to shame.

Biggles has always had a taste for compost, often snacking it right out of the pots we’re preparing, so we made sure to keep him in the house on the morning we emptied out one of our compost bins, but we forgot about The Beanster. She was a nightmare, performing lightning-fast raids on the partially rotted scraps every time our backs were turned. I never once got to see what she’d nicked – I just saw her flouncy bottom on its way to the bottom of the garden after each snatch-and-grab mission.

Biggles samples our latest mix of compost and coconut coir

Our larger compost pile is also under threat now that I’ve loaded it with cow and horse manure

Biggles is great at stealing used cups and spoons from the kitchen, but absolutely crap at hiding the incriminating evidence

It seemed like such a good idea to get into Mum’s garden trug on wheels..

..but getting back out seems a little challenging. On the other hand if I injure myself I get to go to the vet…

Every time we let them back in the garden there’s a run-around in the kitchen, trying to get them out from under the table, extract their snouts from the box of delights that is Susan’s store of seeds and plant pots, and head them off before they make it into the utility room where their kibble is stored. When I’ve collapsed on the sofa from hard toil in the garden, it’s pretty much guaranteed that a certain little girl will whack me in the face with her squeaky fox and demand a play session. It’s almost like having pups all over again, and though it is pesky, I wouldn’t have it any other way.