Mo

The little dog came to us in late winter or early spring of 2018.  

I first saw him in the field chasing cows with a pack of dogs that belonged to the Trash Trailer man and our other neighbor.  The dogs all ran back under the fence when I yelled at them, but the little brindled brown and white puppy stopped just before he went under the barbed wire and looked back at me for 30 seconds or so.  

He came back by himself later that afternoon to chase some more, and I yelled, "You're going to get yourself shot doing that!"  He stopped and looked at me for a minute or so, then turned and went back under the fence.

A few days later, he was in the yard.  "If you're going to be coming through my yard you're going to have to have some Frontline!"  I told him.  I went into the house to get some and when I came back out, he let me walk right up to him.  I bent down to see if I could put the medicine on him.  He didn't run away, and didn't act like he would bite so I put the Frontline on him and then petted him.  His fur was so incredibly soft!  His entire body wiggled with what I can only describe as "happiness" or even "joy."

Over the next few days, when RAF and I were outside, he would show up.  RAF yelled at him and told him to, "Get out of here!"  He just ducked his head down and wiggled all over.  It wasn't very long before RAF was playing with him, throwing sticks which he chased with delight, even bringing them back to be thrown again.

"He needs a name," I said.  RAF said we could call him "Mohammad" (after the late boxer Mohammad Ali) because with his underbite, the little dog looked to be part boxer.  "Mohammad Moses," RAF would call him, because he said he didn't want to sound like he was favoring one religion over another.  But I didn't like that name, so I just called him "Mo."

He started coming back when we weren't outside, and because it was still cold, he curled up into a little ball on the carport slab, shivering and shivering and shivering.  I felt sorry for him...he wasn't very old, maybe just six or seven months old?  I had an old yellow hoodie with a broken zipper so I put it out on on the front porch for him to sleep on.  

Unbeknownst to me, RAF really liked him and secretly let him in the house one night after I had gone to bed.  Of course Lola wasn't having that!  He told me that she barked in her vicious high-pitched Chihuahua voice, and RAF was afraid she would wake me up, so he put the little brindled brown and white dog back outside.  

But the sleeping outside in the cold didn't last long.  When it became obvious that he had adopted us, we adopted him.

Little Mo left us on Friday, August 23, 2024.

His passing has left a huge hole in my heart.  RAF has Lola, and I had Mo.  I told RAF it's funny, but I hadn't realized how completely Mo was intertwined in everything in our lives.  When I feed the cat, he won't be there waiting for his three or four kibbles of cat food.  When I sit down to watch TV, he won't be sleeping on his couch cushion by the window.  When we "go for a ride" he won't be in my lap trying to stick his nose out the cracked open window.  When I sit in the chair by RAF's desk, he won't be there wanting to be picked up and held in my lap like a little puppy.  When RAF plays certain songs, he won't be there howling along.  When I see a rabbit, or the groundhog, or turtles at the pond, or a mole hill in the yard, he won't be there ready for the chase.  When I cut up chicken for supper, or thaw out the hamburger, he won't be there ready to clean up any "scraps" that "accidentally" get left.  He won't be sleeping on the laundry, or following me into the bathroom, or standing there ready to be picked up and put on the bed at 9 pm.  He won't be dancing back and forth with excitement when I pick up his orange walking vest, my camera and walking stick.  He won't be sitting in on the porch with RAF when I come home from town and won't greet me wiggling his entire body when RAF declares, "MOMMY'S HOME!"

It's going to take a while.

Mo on April 30, 2019, sitting and waiting for me to catch up on one of our walks down to the creek.

Mo working at RAF's desk.

Mo sleeping in RAF's lap.

Mo wearing his new orange walking vest on November 25, 2020.  He wasn't too sure
what it was for but it didn't take him long to understand that it meant
 we are going for a walk!

Fixing my mistake

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to try to grow watermelons in the south part of the garden.  The problem was that the area still had lots of grass in it, and my thinking was that because I wouldn't be able to run the tiller through there once the vines started growing I should put something down to block the grass and keep the area looking "nice."

We had some old carpet that we had pulled up from the inside porch and I thought it would be perfect to block the grass.  So I dragged it out to the garden and spread it out by the watermelons.

It was a nice concept, but it didn't really work out (for reasons to be explained later).  

The watermelons didn't grow very well, and I ended up having grass growing there anyway - not through the carpet, but on top of it.  

If I had been smart (sadly, I'm never smart on the front end), I would have pulled the carpet up that fall and taken it to the landfill.  

But I didn't do it.  

And I didn't do it the next year, or the next year, or the next....  It doesn't seem possible that it was that long ago, but I want to say that it may have been there for close to 20 years!

I never forgot forgot that it was there, but after the Bermuda grass grew up over it, it became one of those "out of sight, out of mind" things. 

And that's how it was until about two or three years ago when I decided to plant some blackberry plants my sister gave me there in the south side of the garden.  I planted a couple of them, but when I tried digging a hole for the third plant, I was perplexed when I couldn't sink the shovel (really a spade) down into the dirt.  I stomped on the shovel really hard...nope, not going in.  

I dropped to my knees and started pulling grass to see what was going on.  That's when I found it...the old carpet from many years ago.  I mentally kicked myself...several times.

I don't think I really believed the carpet would break down and turn into dirt.  I knew it was made out of synthetic fibers.  I guess it was just something that was in that category of "so long as it's not bothering me right now, it's not bothering me."  

I ended up using my box cutter to just cut slits in the carpet where I wanted the blackberries to go.  Later when I planted the Jostaberry and my raspberries I did the same thing...I just cut through the carpet so I could dig the planting holes and said to myself, "I really need to get that carpet out of here."

But I didn't do it.

The blackberries did Ok, but I just couldn't seem to keep them watered.  It was the same with the Jostaberry.  It grew a lot in the spring, but once summer came, it started to look quite ill, and eventually almost every single branch on it died.  The raspberry that was planted into the carpet also died.

I thought I had lost the Jostaberry, but this spring, it put out one small branch.  I cut off all the dead parts, hoping that it would survive.

I had ordered an Aronia berry from Food Forest Nursery, and when it arrived, I planted it between the blackberries and the Jostaberry.  Again, I had to cut through the carpet to dig the planting hole, and again, I said to myself, "I really need to get that carpet out of here."

But I didn't do it.

The single branch on the Jostaberry grew quite a bit, but not as much as I had hoped it would.  And when hurricane Beryl came through in early July, the wind broke off the single branch.  I cut it into four sections to see if I can get one to root.  But that was that.  The plant did not put out any more branches.  I had lost it.

It has been so dry this summer that I was also starting to worry about the Aronia berry.  It hadn't grown much at all, even though I had been carrying water to it and had put mulch around it.  

Something just wasn't right.

One evening, I decided to pull the mulch back from the Aronia berry so I could make sure the water soaked in all the way around.  And that's when I did a literal "forehead smack" because I knew then what was wrong.

It was the carpet.

I tugged on it to try to peel it back so I could water the plant, and to my dismay, I discovered roots growing on top of the carpet in a thin layer of decomposed grass and leaves that was only about 1/2" thick.  The roots were very dry.

I pulled and tugged, and tugged and pulled, carefully working the Aronia berry roots loose.  Some of them broke off because they had embedded themselves into the carpet.  But little by little I managed to free the little plant's roots from the horrible synthetic fibers of the carpet.

An orange root from the Aronia berry, broken on the end, but free from carpet.

And once I had pulled the carpet away from the Aronia berry, I decided it was finally time for me to fix my mistake once and for all.

So I pulled and tugged, and tugged and pulled (and mentally kicked myself several times) and little by little, I was able to peel the carpet back.

Underneath, the ground was like concrete.

Hard packed dry dirt under the carpet.

It was bone dry and so hard that I couldn't even drive the pitch fork into it.  The carpet was intended to block weeds and grass from coming up, but what it ended up doing was actually blocking water from going down!

In hindsight, it's really amazing to me that ANYTHING was able to survive where that carpet was.  I think the blackberries did Ok only because they are planted in a low spot that is shaded in the afternoon by the big pecan tree, so there might have been more moisture in the ground there.  

But it's no wonder that the Jostaberry and the one raspberry planted into the carpet died.  

Pulling the carpet up wasn't easy because while the carpet hadn't broken down, the sharp pointed rhizomes of the Bermuda grass did manage to pierce it and had intertwined themselves all through it and anchored it to the ground everywhere it has put down roots.

The carpet was only about 6' wide, but it ran all the way from the third blackberry plant down to the first raspberry plant, a distance of about 20''.

(Incidentally, as I was pulling the carpet out, I also found the remnants of a colored cardboard box that I had put down to block the Bermuda grass.  The corrugated cardboard of the box was gone, but the colored layer on the outside was like a thin film of plastic.  That's why they say don't use colored cardboard like that in the garden.)

It took a couple of evenings for me to finally get it all pulled out. 

So now I have a pile of dirty old carpet to take to the landfill (what a shame), and I have learned a couple of valuable lessons about trying to block weeds.

First, and most obvious, don't use something that won't decompose.  That's just asking for trouble.

Second, things that block grass and weeds from coming up also block water from going down.  If it's being used around trees or shrubs, it needs to be pulled back when I water so the water will actually go down into the ground and not just run off the top of the weed barrier. That's what was happening when I watered last summer.  I just didn't realize it.

I'm still a big believer in using cardboard or newspaper to block weeds and grass, but I'll never again make the mistake of using something that won't rot in a few years.  Twenty years - that's a long time for that carpet to lay there and still be mostly intact.  I am pretty positive that my mistake would have outlasted me...I think had I not finally pulled it out, that carpet would have still been there long after I've died and decomposed.