For too long we’d neglected our crabapple tree in our garden, but over the last couple of years we’ve been pruning and feeding it to bring it back to a good state of health. This year it made an attempt at growing apples; sadly none have got to any decent size and some have already fallen, but those fallen ones have provided hours of entertainment for Daisy.

The rules of crabapple play are pretty simple. You throw it, you chase it, you roll on the ground next to it and howl at it, then pick it up and start all over again.

Monkey has no idea what the fuss it about; he sniffed the apples and deemed them unworthy of attention. As a mature Beagle he’s moved on from the silly obsessions of puppies, instead preferring to grab the loose end of a toilet roll and go sprinting around the house with it, or nick a gardening glove out of someone’s pocket and excitedly carry it to his open air laboratory.

Amazingly I planted around 80 new plants in the garden this week and between the crabapples and toilet paper and gloves, neither of these two numbskulls has had time to think about ripping them up. We haven’t even lost any plants to collateral damage from chases and playfighting, which is bordering on miraculous. And they say Beagles are hard work! What nonsense!

Monkey and Daisy have become quite accustomed to snacking on peas over the last month, or in Monkey’s case it would be more accurate to say pea pods, as he still eyes the peas within with great suspicion. Daisy is always ready to vacuum up his leftovers, so everything works out.

We do however have to time the giving of novel treats quite carefully because she’s still almost incapable of just eating them without first playing with them at length. She can conclude her pea-eating rituals in under 5 minutes, but some items take a lot, lot longer. I gave her a little slip of dried fish skin and after waiting for over half an hour and seeing only minimal progress in the eating of it, I had to swap it out for a very familiar biccie so that we could get her out for her walk. If the fish skin was bad, a crunchy chicken foot was way worse. To be honest she was still a little young to be trying such a challenging treat, but she did manage it eventually, though I stopped watching the clock after she crossed the 70 minute barrier..

When Daisy isn’t spending time not chewing things that are meant to be eaten, she does like to chomp on toys, and for some time now her favorite has been this little GoDog purple dinosaur, originally a gift to Beanie & Biggles from our friends Susan & Rob in the US. It had a little pink sibling but this became the subject of rigorous experimentation in Monkey’s laboratory, back when he was working on his PhD. It did not survive. Now a fully-fledged professor of the physical sciences, Monkey no longer sees the appeal of such small toys, which is partly why the purple dinosaur is still with us. It’s now around 8 years old and incredibly it still squeaks! As these toys have become available in the UK I got the nobbly “sitting duck” model and this too has been a big hit with Daisy.

While Daisy isn’t exactly gentle with her toys, she isn’t the destructive vandal that Beanie was so maybe this little guy will still be squeaking in 8 years time!

As usual, here’s a photographic catch-up on the last couple of weeks:

Guard your pockets! Keep a hand over your coffee! And if you’re an intact boy Beagle, protect your balls! Daisy has suddenly gained the ability to get into, onto and under anything. Nowhere is safe from all-access, crazy Daisy!

I now have to close and lock Monkey’s crate the moment he leaves it, because if I don’t Daisy will sprint in there and pee right in the middle of his bed. She did exactly that three times last week, leaving the confused but stoic Monkster slumming it on a stack of crate mats while his luxury bed went back into the washing machine.

Daisy is now approaching 5 months old, and everything about her has been dialled up several notches. She’s faster and stronger, cheekier and more confident, but also more cuddly, more able to concentrate during her training sessions, and is an even better companion for Monkey, who seems to be happy and settled almost all the time now. She still provides her own soundtrack of squeaks and moans when she’s getting out of bed and hunting for the right toy in the lounge toy box; I’m hoping she’ll never stop because it’s incredibly cute.

After all the shocks that started the year, we’re feeling that we’re back to having a team of two Beagles to go forward with us. Ironically it’s probably that feeling of being ready to move on that has put Beanie, Biggles and Poppy more into our thoughts over the last couple of weeks. I guess you keep a lid on things when you’re still too close to the event, but then as time passes and you start to relax, you let that lid pop up just a little bit.

When the weather has allowed we’ve spent time just sitting in the garden, watching Monkey & Daisy playing and feeling that in some sense our first three pups are around us. The flower beds we built for them are overflowing with growth now. Beanie’s has hundreds of small, colorful flowers fizzing out from the base, with delicate sweet peas providing a more refined show of color higher up. To us it pretty accurately captures our excitable, waggy and (with us at least!) very gentle little girl.

Biggles’ bed is a mess of orange flowers and sunflowers; we’re still waiting for the tall ones to open but their huge leaves look like oversized floppy ears, and soon they’ll have big, silly yellow grinning heads to complete the picture. It’s absolutely Biggles, but it’s not quite how it was supposed to be. Susan bought a packet of “Zulu Prince” seeds and planted some in each of of the new beds. In two of the beds they’ve turned out as follows – which is how they’re supposed to look.

But in Biggly’s bed, they’ve turned out like this:

The logical explanation is that – purely by accident – a couple of rogue Venidium Orange Prince seeds made it into the seed packet at the factory, and by pure chance they both ended up going into Biggles’s flower bed. We prefer to think that Biggles took some time off from dinging his windchime and decided that he wanted a strictly orange and yellow color scheme for his display.

It goes without saying that we still struggle most with the abrupt end to Poppy’s short life; sometimes when we’re cuddling Daisy, or Daisy does something reminiscent of Poppy, the thought “that should be Poppy” creeps in. Susan put a variety of corn flowerseeds in her bed and in two other nearby beds. In Poppy’s bed alone, the corn chamomile quickly dominated and it looks like a sea of daisies with the occasional corn cockle & poppy breaking through. If Poppy wanted to signal her approval of our new girl pup, that would be one way to do it.

As I said earlier Monkey is pretty much his normal self now that he’s got Daisy as his partner in crime, but he still has one personality quirk that sets him apart from all the other Beagles we’ve known: he has absolutely no interest in getting into bed with us. Actually he has one other unique personality quirk: a strange obsession with licking up other dogs’ pee instead of just sniffing it. Oh yeah, and then there’s his habit of playing with treats instead of just speed-swallowing them, and his weird habit of scratching while standing on three legs. Come to think of it, Monkey has quite a few unique personality features, but the lack of interest in bed snuggles is one we wanted to correct. That’s why every night I place a dog biccie on my bedside cabinet, and bury it under the pillows each morning when the Monkster is first released from his crate. He’s got used to this early morning hunt-the-biccie game, and once he’s on the bed, he tends to settle, but still only above the covers, and then only at our feet. Perhaps when Daisy is older and we let her into bed, he’ll see more merit in morning snuggles.

To finish, more shots from the last couple of weeks.

I had some suitable wood left over from other projects so I made a new pair of agility jumps for Monkey. He jumps well, but he doesn’t half pull some funnny faces as he prepares for takeoff!

Monkey samples the first of this year’s homegrown raspberries, but of course he only chomps down on it once he’s thrown it around the garden for 5 minutes :)

Daisy looking cute

Nicking stuff from your Mum’s potting table is great  fun

But it can difficult to run around with it when your legs are still too short!

A moment of quiet contemplation as team Beagle goes for the day’s first trip into the garden

A deep cut of the garden’s wildlfower areas reveals a long-lost ball that really should get binned, but Daisy is instantly taken with it.

I replaced the disk of trunk that used to mark Poppy’s favorite posing location, with a small bench made from sleepers.

It’s an instant hit with Daisy, who finds a new use for it on hot days.

A brand new oinking pink pig makes an appearance and Monkey immediately hogs it, ruthlessly eliminating it’s oinking ability.

In response, we hear Daisy’s cover version of the classic Beagle song “He’s got my toy and it’s so unfair!”

It’s wrestling time..


..And all’s right in the Monkeyverse