While living in New Mexico, I was introduced to drip line irrigation. This is something that is actually pretty incredible. I was familiar with irrigation at a farm because my grandfather sometimes took me out with him when he would move pipes or irrigation tubing. But drip line used in gardens is a nice conservative way to deliver water to trees, plants, or gardens.

The desert landscape at my house had a raised backyard that was full of trees. An intricate web of drip lines went around each tree and when activated delivered enough water to keep the trees nourished, without wasting water on areas that did not need hydration. The trees were anchored in sandy soil with cacti around them, so there was no need to water the cactus and succulents.

The drip line is also fairly easy to repair because it’s small and can easily be patched or have parts replaced. When we moved to the house the drip line was already set up and woven with care through the multiple trees.

I will tell you a story of when it’s not easy to repair a drip line. And it involves a beautiful 1 year old German Shepherd.

We adopted Ginger from the local animal shelter. We already had a border collie, but she was very bonded to my husband because she had been with him for years before we got married. When my husband started traveling for work he was worried about me being alone in the house for days at a time, especially in the evening.

One day he took me to the animal shelter and wanted to find a larger dog that would bond with me. I did not expect to be riding in our pickup truck with a German Shepherd when we left the shelter. Yet, here we were, parked at a hardware store waiting for my husband to return. I could barely make eye contact with her because she scared me. She was big and her head sat higher than mine as she sat next to me. We were strangers to one another and it took several days before I got used to the fact that she was sharing a home with us.

I do not say this lightly. Ginger became the love of my life in many ways. We bonded big time and she would have done anything for me. When I would travel for work she would get upset and rearrange our landscape, pulling on the landscaping material underneath the rock in the yard and as a result piled the rocks up. We would have to put everything back into place.

One time I was gone for a longer period of time than usual. When I came back she had ripped up the drip lines and drug them down to the house. It was a messy pile of plastic lines. We had no idea how to even begin to place these where they had been and because she had dug her teeth into them we had to turn it on to try to find the leaks and repair each one before laying the line down again.

It took several hours to repair the tubing. Once we made our repairs we laid it back down around the trees and we created a map or diagram of where the drip line ran so that we could always go back to that if we had any issues again.

Dogs are like humans in many ways. They make mistakes. They feel remorse. And they need to be forgiven.