Dog Friendly Backyard: 11 Tips To Transform Your Yard

Having a dog friendly backyard isn’t some idealized Pinterest photo: it’s making improvements to your yard to make it better for your dog. Whether you have a fiery puppy or a laid back senior dog, making improvements to your yard is a rewarding process that will allow your dog to have as much fun as possible when they’re home. Most of your dog’s time will be at home and making a dog friendly backyard will help make that time as stress free and fun as possible for both you and your dog.

Why does having a dog friendly backyard matter?

There are many benefits from having a dog friendly backyard, but tour favorite is the increased enjoyment of your space for you and your dog. For example, if you’re not constantly correcting your dog from barking or digging under your shed, your time with your dog is much more likely to be spent doing activities you both enjoy, whether that’s playing your favorite outside games with your dog or simply giving your dog frozen Toppl recipes.

More to the point, even making your area a more dog friendly backyard can help improve the safety and health of your dog. At a minimum, your dog should be able to be outside without worrying about them leaving your yard and keep them away from dangerous situations. It’s possible to dog proof a fence (check out our first section for additional tips) to at least keep your dog inside it with a minimal amount of effort. Similarly, keeping your dog out of known areas of your yard that you know are dangerous should be a minimum standard to making a dog friendly backyard.

In addition, the more of a dog friendly yard you’re able to create, the more your dog can enrich themselves in it and enjoy being outside. This can lead to decreased stress (for you and your dog) and increased positive physical activity. As with humans, increased activity has an entire list of benefits besides just having more fun with your dog. Improved joint health and weight of our two of our favorite benefits. Even if you have a couch pup-tato like us (looking at you, Primmie), food-based enrichment is a great place to start. Check out our friends over at VCA Hospital’s article on Enrichment & Foraging Toys if you want some additional information.

Our tips for a dog friendly backyard

Now for the reason you’re here: our top ways to transform your yard into a more dog friendly backyard. We recommend prioritizing any improvements based on what the largest issues are for you and working toward the smaller issues. For example, if your dog doesn’t stay in their fence, making your plants dog safe doesn’t matter nearly as much as keeping them off the road.

Dog proofing your fence

Our first tip for creating a dog friendly backyard, we’ll be discussing dog proofing a fence. You could otherwise have the perfect dog friendly yard, but if your pup wanders over to your neighbor’s yard, it doesn’t really matter. We wrote an entire article on this topic and highly recommend checking it out if you’re having issues keeping your dog in your yard. We’ll touch on a few of the most common issues here.

The most common issue in our experience is going over the fence. If you have a small breed, this may not be an issue, but larger and more athletic dogs can scale surprisingly high barriers. If your dog can jump over your fence, the best option is just getting a taller fence or building it out to be taller if that’s an option. Fortunately, that’s less common than climbing, which is easier to address. Our favorite options to deal with dogs who climb are fence extensions or a coyote roller, depending on how motivated your dog is.

If your dog prefers digging or tunnelling their way out, it’s much less expensive to deal with than climbing or jumping. The easiest option is to add additional material to the bottom of our fence, like a footer, to make the gap smaller. This will solve the issue for most pups, especially combined with landscaping the fence edge. Something as simple as adding pavers or gravel against the edge of the fence is enough to make it much more challenging for your dog to have success. If you have an Olympic level digger, then you’re going to have to use one of the more extreme options in our guide.

The third most common issue is going through your fence or gate. Adding more material to your fence is the easiest and preferred option, but that’s not possible in every setup. If that doesn’t work, galvanized wire or Tenax netting are great options to install on your fence and works great. If you’re having trouble with the gate specifically, creating an interlock (double gate setup) works great, especially if you have children. We highly recommend this option, especially if you can combine it with a lock (bicycle locks can work great for this!)

Select dog friendly plants

One of the first tasks that we’d recommend when creating your dog friendly backyard is to select dog safe plants. How important this will be for your dog will vary based on your dog’s personality. If your dog has little to no interest in plants, you can get away with some sloppiness here. For us, Primmie messes with plants and loves foraging for food. If your pup is like her, we’d recommend trying to make sure you have as few potential issues as possible.

We wrote a few articles about plants, but the most relevant here are our favorite dog safe flowers and dog safe outdoor plants. There is an enormous variety of plants that are safe for dogs and still look great and we highly recommend trying to tailor your options to dog safe options if possible. Some of our favorite flowers are celosia and corral bells and we love maple trees. Check out the ASPCA’s Toxic Plant List if you want a more complete list.

If you’re looking for some dog friendly backyard plants that can serve multiple purposes, we’d point you toward our list of dog safe shrubs. We’ve used shrubs as sight line blocks and physical barriers besides being pleasing to look at. Forsythia is one of our favorite underrated options, especially with how easy it is to prune and keep alive.

We have a backyard garden that’s even full of dog-safe vegetable plants. Some of our favorites are green beans, zucchini, other squashes, strawberries, and carrots, and most of them end up as treats for our dogs! Check out our favorite fruits and vegetables dogs can eat if you want more garden plant ideas or can dogs eat strawberry preserves if you’re interested in that question!

Create a designated play area

After addressing any safety issues, creating a designated area for play is our favorite part of making a dog friendly backyard. The whole point of having a dog safe yard is to have fun with your pup, so what’s better than making a space for their favorite activities? Goomba loves chasing after his Hero boomerang, so we always make sure he has a few clear paths in the flatter areas of our yard for that. Prim loves our DIY dog puzzles, so that’s easier, but just as fun for us.

Your pup’s interests and favorite activities will determine what the best options are here, but there’s a variety of options for whatever your dog likes. If you don’t have a yard or only have a small area, using a flirt pole for dogs is a great option. We recommend Squishy Face’s flirt pole or using the DIY one detailed in our post. If you have a larger yard or an extremely active dog, try making your own DIY dog agility equipment. Our favorites are the agility tunnel and agility jumps.

Reduce mud in your yard (and house)

While not a necessity, getting rid of the muddy areas in your yard can help you have a more dog friendly backyard. If your dog doesn’t enjoy getting dirty, like our Goomba, mud will can limit the areas that they are willing to explore. On the human side, we don’t enjoy cleaning our pups off every time they go outside in the spring and our pups don’t enjoy it either.

Reducing muddy areas can help with a few different issues in your yard. The first, and most obvious, benefit is reducing the amount of cleaning required for both your pups and house. We don’t enjoy cleaning dog collars any more than we already have to as we already have enough pup laundry to do every week.

Reducing mud can also dramatically reduce issues with digging. Whether you use grass seed or want to do a dog friendly backyard without grass, dogs are much less likely to dig when there isn’t loose, exposed soil. This won’t solve the issue for every pup, but Prim is an avid digger and won’t even attempt to dig on gravel. Dog friendly backyard landscaping can also serve double duty and make it much harder for your pup to escape your fence. We discuss this in greater detail in the tunnelling portions of our guide on how to dog proof a fence.

Create a designated area for relaxing

Similar to creating an area for play time, creating a designated area for relaxing is a great way to make a more dog friendly backyard. This doesn’t have to be some elaborate mini-deck or other grand design, just an area that’s good for basking or laying down. If you have a deck, that’s a perfect option and Prim loves hanging out on ours every day.

If you have the room or ability, having enough room for some food-based enrichment will make your pup’s outdoor time more enjoyable. Whether your dog likes DIY snuffle mats or some frozen enrichment, it doesn’t take much room at all to create a spot for them to enjoy their treats. Snuffle mats have been a staple for us for a long time and we’ve used them to help desensitize our dogs to noises. As soon as Prim hears a noise she’s uncomfortable with, she runs straight to her snuffle mat without prompting.

If your pup enjoys frozen treats more, our dogs’ favorites are Toppl recipes and frozen Pupsicle recipes. We get around a half hour of entertainment for our pups with a Toppl and, typically, 10-15 minutes per each of our cheap Pupsicle refills.

Besides food based enrichment, our usual outdoor setup involves an elevated dog bed, a water bowl, and whatever your shade of choice is. We use a cheap canopy most of the time and it works great to help keep everyone comfortable. We typically use a stainless steel dog bowl and think it’s the best material for dog bowls in most situations.

If you need help to find a suitable solution for your dog’s waste, check out our favorite ways to deal with dog poop until garbage day. There’s a solution for every situation!

Give your pup a spot to dig

Giving your pop a spot to dig may seem counterintuitive, especially if you are trying to keep your dog in your fence, but it’s a great way to make a more dog friendly backyard. Digging offers many benefits for your dog, and Goomba’s physical therapist even recommended it for his rehab. The trick is to give your dog an appropriate spot to dig and limiting options in inappropriate areas, like plants or fence edges.

This overlaps a bit with dog proofing a fence, but the easiest ways to deter your dog from digging are to minimize loose, exposed dirt and barrier off areas you don’t want your dog to dig, with fences or gravel. Most dogs won’t dig on gravel, even those that love digging like Prim, and they’re much less likely to dig on grassy areas.

If you want a defined digging area instead of random areas in your yard, that’s easy to accomplish, too! The cheapest options are to make a recessed garden, just like you would with a raised garden, but in the garden. If Primmie decides to start digging in inappropriate spots, that’s what we’ll be making. If you want a pre-built option, we’d recommend either a children’s sandbox or one of those cheap kid’s pools you can find at the dollar store, which both work great in the ground or on top of it.

If you need some help teaching your dog how to dig, check out the Canine Conditioning Coach’s video. We use Anna Lee’s physical therapy for Goomba, and it’s been extremely helpful with his recovery from knee surgery. She’s a great resource, and we can’t recommend her enough.

Reduce (or eliminate) dangerous chemicals

We’ll keep this section shorter because you’ll have to make your own decisions on what you feel is safe or worth the risk, but we have yet to find an effective herbicide or pesticide that doesn’t have significant negative side effects. There are certainly some that are worse and some that have less side effects, but your pup’s paws are in direct contact with the ground, unlike your feet. This means that their exposure is going to be even worse than yours and that’s amplified even more if your pup likes to eat grass, like Prim.

For pesticides, there are a few okay options for managing pests. For flying pests, we’ve had a ton of success with Spectracide’s yellow jacket trap and recommend it or a similar option if you have issues. If you’re dealing with insects attracted to specific environmental conditions, like mosquitos, we’d recommend trying to resolve the issue instead (water), since it would be a lot more effective. For example, if your yard is too wet like ours, you can install a French drain or other water mitigation system.

Even products marketed as pet safe are rarely safe if they are a pesticide or herbicide. For example, a local lawn company in town repeatedly insisted their products are safe for dogs, even if they eat grass. The representative wouldn’t share what the products were willingly, but after I found out, a quick google revealed a whole slew of scientific studies linking one ingredient to various cancers, even in small quantities. Definitely do your own research and we recommend erring on the side of safety. Your pup won’t care if your yard has a few dandelions, even if they do annoy you.

If you really want to use chemicals to treat your yard, we recommend blocking it off so you can do it sections. You can block half of your yard and treat that half and then repeat with the other half. This rotation can help minimize potential issues, even if it doesn’t fully solve them.

Block sightlines to limit barking and fence running

An often overlooked way to create a more dog friendly backyard, blocking sightlines for your dog can help in a variety of ways. If you’d like to decrease your dog’s barking outside, decreasing the frequency of their barking is step one. This won’t solve all of your barking problems, but it will make it much easier to work on desensitizing your dog to noises and objects. We have a few different options we’ve used (and still use) to help minimize outside barking.

Even if you don’t care about your dog’s barking, using sightline barriers can help minimize fence running. This will decrease the unappealing trails in your yard that your dog creates from running over the same patches of yard.

Whatever your motivation, desensitizing your dogs’ to noises is a fairly straightforward process and can help make a more dog friendly backyard. Pair the noises at a volume and intensity that your dog is not reacting to it and pair it with positive experiences. Our dogs’ favorites are snuffle mats, Toppls, or playtime and we’ve worked past a variety of noises that had been problematic.

If you’re wondering what to use as sightline barriers, we’ve used a variety of options and had success with most. Utilizing dog safe shrubs is a great low maintenance option, but if you need a faster solution, we’ve used privacy screens (we still use the linked one) for years. If you have a chain-link fence, privacy screens or slats are a bit more expensive, but look more permanent. If you’re in a pinch and just need something for a short-term problem, tarps can make a great quick fix, too.

Create your own fenced garden

Creating fenced gardens is one of our favorite tips for a more dog friendly backyard since it’ll allow you to have additional plants in your yard, even if your dog likes to dig up plants.

Primmie gets a little wild sometimes and went through a stint where she would enjoy digging up our ferns. No other plants in the yard, just the ferns. We didn’t particularly enjoy that behavior, but also didn’t want to chase her around outside like crazy people. Our solution was to give her an area to dig that doesn’t disturb plants (check out the section on digging for more information) and fence off the ferns. It’s worked great!

There are a ton of different ways to accomplish this, but the cheapest we found is using garden stakes and deer netting. If your dog likes to act like a battering ram, something more substantial, like hardware cloth or Tenax multi-purpose net, is a preferred option. One of our neighbors showed us the Tenax netting, and we tried some out on our fern garden. It’s been fantastic and is probably our new favorite material. It’s slightly more expensive, but much easier to deal with than deer netting and much more durable.

To be transparent, we have some not dog safe plants behind fencing in our backyard, but they’re all behind substantial fencing that our pups haven’t shown interest in over the years they have been there. This is definitely one of those times where you need to know your dog and what they’ll do. Even with the plants being behind fencing, the worst of our plants would only cause GI upset if our pups somehow get behind the fencing. Some plants can have real wild toxicity, so definitely be sure you know how risky a plant is before introducing it near your pup.

Block off areas that aren’t safe for your pup

Blocking off unsafe areas is one of the most important aspects of creating a dog friendly backyard. Having the most fun yard for your pup doesn’t matter nearly as much if there are hazards floating around that can injure your pup. Depending on what your dog’s preferences are for activities, this can range from eating unsafe plants to sharp objects protruding from structures. If your dog has joint issues or arthritis, this can even include areas of your yard that can be higher impact on them.

The preferred solution is to resolve unsafe issues, but that if that isn’t possible, any of the ways we’ve mentioned previously to block off areas of your yard work great. Our current favorite is Tenax netting and garden stakes, and it’s been extremely durable for us. It’s about as good of a quick, temporary solution as we’ve seen without having a fence or plant barrier. Recently, we had to redo a large section of French drain and used a combination of barriers to block off the ditch while we were working.

Our own story for blocking off areas of our yard involves Goomba’s recovery from CCL surgeries. Over the better part of a year, Goomba was waiting for surgery or recovering from surgery because of a torn CCL (dog version of an ACL). During both periods, Goomba was supposed to limit the forces on his rear legs to avoid further damage and have a quicker recovery. To make our lives easier, we restricted Goomba to a small, flat area of our yard by blocking off large sections of our yard. It helped make the recovery process quicker for him and highly recommend it if your pup is in a similar situation.

If you find yourself in this unfortunate situation, we highly recommend checking out our guides related to recovery from rear leg injuries: recovery from CCL surgery and symptoms of a CCL tear in dogs. The earlier you notice the potential injury, the easier your recovery process will be.

Create a water feature for your dog

If your pup loves the water, creating a water feature can be a great opportunity to make your yard more fun for your pup. There are a variety of different ways to accomplish this and no right answer, so use whatever works best for your situation!

The easiest option is a garden hose with or without a sprinkler. This is great for those easy to entertain pups, and you may have most or all of the supplies already. We’re constantly fussing with our yard and trying to make it less bad with some success. It’s easy to store and doesn’t require a lot of storage either, so it’s definitely our favorite if it works for you.

The next option to make a more dog friendly yard is a splash pad, which is basically an upgraded sprinkler. We haven’t found one that we liked enough to recommend, yet, but children’s splash pads are also an option. You’ll want to make sure the material is reasonably durable and not too slippery.

Our favorite option for the couch pup-tatos out there is a swimming pool for your dog. We recommend the Frisco dog swimming pool as our top pick. We love Chewy’s brand, Frisco, as the prices are always good and the quality is usually better than you’re expecting. Another viable option is a kid’s pool, but the cloth ones seem to rip easily and the plastic ones are super slick, so be careful with your purchase.

Conclusion

A dog friendly backyard is not a requirement to have a healthy and happy dog, but it can make your life (and your dog’s) much more fun and easier. Most dogs do best when they have a variety of appropriate ways they can entertain themselves with and without their humans. Whether it’s a space to run and play fetch or a clear area to have food-based enrichment in the sun, every dog can benefit from making your area a more dog friendly backyard.

What are your favorite ways that you’ve made your own yard more dog friendly? Share your favorite dog friendly backyard tips or improvements with us at Lincoln@TheRulyBullly.com or by tagging our Instagram @TheRulyBully! We love to hear from you and thanks for stopping by!

Have fun!