We’re poised to begin our spring mulch and manure adventure. In addition to our regular trip to the big, free mulch pile our county road crew creates, we’re going to drive to one of our local student’s home to load horse manure into our utility trailer. Also, Bud’s convinced we can begin composting dog manure.
I’ve never heard of composting proteins (our dogs are omnivors), but he’s seen something on the internet about it, and we certain have plenty of raw material with which to experiment. <g>
These sunny days, though we’re experiencing bone-chilling temps in the teens, have us both thinking of spring. And spring brings campers, so this will be cottage clean-up week at Country Dream. With all the winter storms the trees have dropped dead branches, there are pine cones and nut shells, all needing stacked and burned.
I’ve attempted to get a teenager interested in work-for-training but there seem to be lots of other activities keeping our dog-training teens busy. We’ve asked them to help us with clean-up, in exchange for agility and obedience training, and had no takers from local 4H kids.
So I’m going to try to interest a couple of my friends in a cottage clean-up this week, and Bud will be in charge of hauling mulch and manure.
All this work is designed to improve the surfaces on which dogs walk and run. At the cottages we not only burn deadwood, but we want to rake up leaves and debris on the ground and throw down grass seed. I have pictures from 20 years ago when both cottages were surrounded by grass. In recent years the trees have grown and overwhelmed the grassy areas with shade AND debris.
For our spring camps I’m considering offering little 30-60-minute lunchtime workshops covering such topics as obedience-for-agility, intro to rally, intro to retrieving, and intro to tracking. Since we give campers a 2-hour break for lunch, these workshops would be scheduled while other campers are taking lunch. And I’d be teaching as Bud will be taking his break from instructing.
Tags: agility camp, basic dog obedience, Bud Houston, dog agility, dog performance sports, Marsha Houston, rally obedience
The 2-Minute Dog Trainer Blog 
March 3, 2009 at 12:21 pm |
I love the idea of the short lunchtime workshops during the camps, especially since I don’t eat lunch. We’ve wanted to get into tracking, and heaven knows we need all the obedience for agility we can get!
As to the composting, dog manure is fine for compost to be used in non-edible gardens, but must never be spread in gardens destined for food, due to the numerous nasty beasties, especially e. coli.