GARDENING-What to Plant Where to Keep Your Dog Safe!

I LOVE gardening and have been doing so since my great-grandma helped me plant my first flower garden at a very young age. She was an avid gardener and I was ALWAYS her little helper….from helping her pick cucumbers & strawberries to snapping the ends off of green beans. Spending time gardening with my grandma was one of my favorite things to do & will forever be one of my favorite memories of my childhood. What she taught me stuck with me to this day & each year I always have to have a garden!

Per my great-grandma, you should ALWAYS wait until Memorial Day weekend to do your planting, so I wanted to share this information for those of you who are like me and waited until now.

When I was gardening with my great-grandma, the choice of what plants to buy and what to plant where so my dogs wouldn’t eat them wasn’t really a concern. Now that I have a dog and try to use the freshest ingredients that I can in our homemade treats, I need to be more cautious!  I constantly have my phone or computer readily available to look up what is toxic and what is not just to be on the safe side before I buy anything! (The joy of the internet is that we have that information so readily available to us now that we have no excuse to not take advantage of it!)

I posted a picture of the 15 most dangerous plants for dogs. There are a lot more out there that are not pictured, so I wanted to touch on a few of those today.

1. The first, and it breaks my heart to even mention them as they are my favorite flower, are Lilies of the Valley. These gorgeous, white bells with one of the most perfumed aromas can do some major damage to your pets if eaten. If a dog (or cat) ingests them expect some of the following: vomiting, diarrhea, possible seizures, a drop in heart rate, and severe cardiac arrhythmia. Although, I will never stop loving these beauties despite the harm they can do, they will stay in my front yard where our dogs cannot reach them!
2. One of the most common plants to have in your yard (& some of the best to plant for those of you who don’t have a green thumb as they are hard to kill) are hostas. You guessed it! They are poisonous too! As with the lilies of the valley, when a dog eats leaves from a hosta, expect vomiting and diarrhea.
3. What is one of the most common plants to have in a garden? A tomato plant! Yes, these sadly are poisonous too! The green parts of the plant, the leaves, stem, and smaller green tomatoes contain tomatine which is an ingredient that is very toxic to dogs if ingested. Although, it’s fine to give your dog ripe tomatoes, you may want to place a fence around your garden if your dog is known to do some gardening of his or her own! (Ours definitely have been culprits in sneaking a tomato or 2!)
4. Another hard to kill plant that most of us, at one point, have probably had in our gardens is none other than rhubarb. If you catch your dog munching on rhubarb leaves, head to the vet IMMEDIATELY!!!!! If eaten, symptoms include salivation, tremors, and kidney failure. This is a plant that is not to be taken lightly, so best to be safe and head directly to the vet to make sure your pet is safe!

There are many, many more, but hopefully this will help you with your planting now & in future years. Always check before buying! If I had to give up planting lilies of the valley, I definitely would to keep my pets safe. It’s better to be safe than sorry & our pets safety will ALWAYS come first!