Maybe I could call this Gardening in the Dark. With Helpers.
It's a long transition to perfectly blissful gardening with puppies. I want the yard to be compatible with our helpful garden buddies, but I also want it to be attractive and low maintenance.
We live in the Pacific Northwest, so it rains a bit. The ground gets soft for half the year, so the digging and running wears holes into the ground and trails into the landscape. This is not to mention their deliberate garden help. Last fall when I pulled up my tomato plants, the puppies pulled up my rosemary bushes. Monkey see, monkey do, I guess. But my goal is to design around all of that so that we can live in harmony with the dogs and the yard.
We live on a wooded lot -- a beautifully wooded lot, which we love. The other design challenge is that most of the yard is shaded, and the sunny spots already have spectacular things growing in them. Rhodos, azaleas, hydrangeas, roses, lilies -- all kinds of pretty flowering things. I want to keep all of that while I make the buddies' wanton help less obvious.
I also want to install a greenhouse and a fairly substantial kitchen garden, but I need to find space with sunlight. I will otherwise stick to indigenous and shade tolerant plants. Happily, the "weeds" that grow here are beautiful, so I'm transplanting a lot of them from one part of the yard to another.