Last night he got me up at 11:30, but then not again until a little after 7am! I even got up to use the bathroom once, and he slept through it. Oh, I thought this might never happen after all the 2-4 am pee & poop trips in the dark.
I expect it will be a few days before he goes through the night again, but I'm hoping they'll happen more and more frequently. I'll still have to get up to pee, but there's a big difference between shuffling to the bathroom and taking a hike to the back of the yard (which includes putting on a robe & slippers and putting some kind of leash on Marley).
A couple of nights, when there weren't too many mushrooms, I let him go out while I held a flashlight to keep an eye on him.
Speaking of mushrooms, I'm trying a "natural" approach to mushroom eradication. Since the mushrooms are really just the equivalent of flowers, with the actual plant equivalent below the surface, picking them and tossing them over the fence (or in the garbage) only keeps Marley from eating them. As soon as it rains, or we water the lawn, they pop right up again for several days. Several sources on the internet recommend a solution of 2 TBS baking soda in a gallon of water, applied with a sprayer when the temperature is between 60-75. Since the whole battle is to keep him from eating them, I don't just spray the mushrooms. I pluck the little monsters and immediately spray where I just plucked. That way the above ground part is gone but I still know exactly where to spray. I don't know how effective, or how long it will take yet, but I'll keep any eye out for how many come back now that I'm spraying where I pluck.
We've got at least 3 or43 (maybe more, it's hard to tell) kinds of small yellow-brown-tan mushrooms that don't seem to get more than about an inch to inch and a half across. Mostly we try to find them while they're still 1/4 - 1/2 inch across. That means they're still down in the grass and hard to see if you're not looking straight down at them. Or see Marley going for something in the grass and get him off it and pluck whatever's left.
We also have puffballs. Again, we've been able to find most of them when they're still only an inch or so across. Being white, and I mean white, they're easy to spot. The danger with these is mostly from releasing the spores and inhaling them ... unless it's one of the few toxic varieties.
And we have boletus mushrooms. These are the biggest ones. As they mature to 2, 3 or more inches across (overnight they can get that big, I've been watching) they also get slimy on top. These are a spongy mushroom with no gills, just lots of spongelike holes all over the bottom.
And the mysterious gray "fluted" mushroom that I've only seen once so far. I keep watching for it, but have not seen it since that one time.
Is this a unique situation here in our yard? Nope, the lawn at the courthouse has at least as many mushrooms and as much moss. I took Marley to the dog park to start getting him used to it. And the mushrooms (only a half dozen or so that I saw) were tall, fairy tale tall-cap mushrooms, but much paler and a bit larger than what we've been plucking. The cemetery has a curvy line of them - looking like ours but several sizes bigger.
Any of you know good ways to rid a lawn of mushrooms without poisoning the pets?
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