Gardening Tips For Pet Owners: How To Prepare Your Garden

How To Make Your Garden Pet-Friendly

From Mother Nature Network's Morieka Johnson:

Deborah Harrison is preparing for a feeding frenzy.

She was hanging a bat house recently when I called to talk about gardening. In addition to their powers of pollination, bats make summers a bit more tolerable by feasting on bugs. According to Bat Conservation International, one brown bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour, and Harrison expects a long, bug-filled summer.

“We didn’t have enough real cold, sustained temperatures, and that’s what kills insect larvae,” says Harrison, general manager of Habersham Gardens in Atlanta. “Nothing reduced the insect population, so they are all going to hatch and it is going to be wild.”

Forewarned is forearmed.

While I’m not quite ready to build an enclosure and welcome bats to my backyard, birds and butterflies provide welcome entertainment for my dog Lulu. Once flowers start blooming, she spends hours staring out the back window. I’m stepping up my game this year so that she has plenty of eye candy later this year. Prepare your lawn -- and your pets -- for spring and summer.

List and captions courtesy of MNN

Got Mulch?

Pet friendly garden tips

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot