Keep Your Dog From Munching On Your Garden With A Household Staple

Dogs are lovable, fun companions — until they get into something they shouldn't. And when that something is the garden that you pamper almost as much as your pets, this puppy faux pas can be aggravating, to say the least. Since it's hard to stay mad at those adorable pooches, you may have come to realize that it's easier to prevent doggy missteps in the first place than recover from them. That's why, when it comes to deterring your dogs from eating everything in your garden, a bottle of plain old white vinegar comes in handy.

There are a couple of options for how to apply vinegar to your plants. You can spray it on them, at either full strength or dilute it first to a half-and-half solution mixed with water. Dampening cotton balls with vinegar and placing them near plants your dog is attracted to can be an even better idea. No matter which method you choose, you want to ensure that you don't drip too much vinegar into the soil, or it could be detrimental to the very plants you're trying to protect.

There's no doubt that vinegar has a strong odor. Many humans don't care for it, so it's not unreasonable to see why dogs don't either. In fact, as pungent as it is to the human nose, the odor is much stronger to a dog nose. Canines have as many as 300 million receptors in their noses for detecting scents, compared to approximately six million in the human nose. Anything you can smell, good or bad, is going to be amplified for your four-legged friend when they take a whiff.

Since dogs love sniffing out new scents, a strong odor like vinegar can overwhelm their nose, which is exactly what keeps them at bay when they encounter the smell near plants. Therefore, applying vinegar on or around the plants that your dog would otherwise munch on is a great problem solver. Bonus tip: When applied the same way, vinegar can work to keep cats out of your shrubbery, too.