Dogs and gardening

[Solo2]

We've got a gorgeous 11 week old golden retriever puppy - and a lovely landscaped garden, which I'm still developing. The two currently don't mix and I spend much of the time following pur puppy around on a long leash, guding him away from too much destruction.

However, when recently watching Carl Kelin's Cottage Garden series, I was struck by how her two dogs - one looked like a puppy - happily roamed her garden, without neeing supervision and her plot was lovely. It seemed she was able to combine hours of gardening with 'free range dogs'.

So - those of you who love both gardening and dogs, how do you combine the two? Will our puppy just lose interest eventually in digging holes, biting off all new shoots and basically any twigs and bark off trees, getting hyper whenever I turn on a hosepipe and destroying anything new planted?

I have a five year old chocolate lab who has learnt over the years which parts of the garden he is allowed on. I always made sure he had special garden toys which were never allowed indoors so focussed his mind on something special in the garden. The worst time was probably when I had a young cat and they went round together biting all my plant labels in half so I had masses of pots of seedlings with no labels, luckily they've both grown out of that now.
The only thing that still gets him is the hose so if I don't want him to get wet he has to go indoors.
It is a gradual process but retrievers are pretty intelligent and will learn remarkably quickly providing you establish the rules.

Fence off what they can't go in. I've had to do that.

During the winter my garden is like a sess pit. I am s l o w l y trying to get it all looking nice.

My pup is now about 18mths old and I had hoped would be a bit better this spring. He loves being in the garden especially if I'm outside too, but he is a bit of an enthusiastic digger and also gets wild moods where he likes to race around regardless of obstacles. We spent last weekend putting up a new fence around the vegetable patch and then he sat outside whimpering while I did the final digging session (I did feel horribly mean, but I didn't want him to get manure all over himself). Hosepipes are just very exciting

Thanks. Ideally, I don't want to have to fence off part of the garden, as the way it's landscaped it'd look weird if suddenly I blocked off some with a fence. I'm hoping that our pup will gradually lose interest in biting off plant heads/ twigs etc etc. I'm currently allowing him to dig in one place only. However, I still can't ever let him roam loose and alone in the garden but when he's out there have to follow him round, which means I get to do no gardening at all unless he's asleep indoors, my DCs don't need me, the business I run from home doesn't need me....basically, increasingly rarely!!!