As Mocha is still a puppy, we need to get her potty trained. Living in a condo without a yard but with a small patio, we’ve decided the small patio will be the “outdoorsy” space to transition her to potty outside after her puppy vaccination is complete. More information is below the picture.
There are 2 lawns. I water it a little bit every couple of days.
The top lawn, the rectangular one, is made of a Boots Tray and sod from Home Depot. The total for that project is about $25.
The bottom lawn, the square one (with Mocha on it) is 24″ x 24″ from DoggieLawn. This costs $39 + tax, free shipping.
She ended up doing all her business in the bottom lawn, but most likely because we put her potty pad that’s been peed on on the bottom one. Then since then, she’s been using that one. She likes to hang out on the top one.
What we learned is that the grass that’s been peed on dies really quickly, because dog pee naturally has high nitrate level. There are products that our pup can eat to help lower the nitrate level, but since it’s an additional and not necessarily a serious problem, we don’t try it out for now. Mocha doesn’t really care that the grass has browned and she keeps pottying there. We can also water it after she pees there to dilute the nitrate level, and just overall prevent the dying out from drying. Without watering, the grass on the lawn will probably just die within 1 – 1.5 weeks.
Why do we have these lawns?
We can’t walk her yet before her DHPP puppy vaccination is completed at 16 weeks old, so… she needs to do potty somewhere. We have heard that disposable potty pads that allows dogs to pee indoors teach the dogs that it’s ok to pee indoors. We don’t want that. The idea is to transition to potty outdoors easily after the vaccination is complete. We could also use fake grass tray, but the sod is very convenient because the grass absorbs the water, we don’t need to drain the tray. The stool has been picked up with toilet paper and flushed down the toilet. This makes a great system for us.
The first few days, we limit her in the kitchen fenced in with a pen. If she doesn’t repeat a potty accident, she’ll hopefully avoid getting used to it. The pen helps managing her so that she doesn’t go potty in an unknown room of the condo at an unknown time. We watch her like a hawk and realize that she’ll disengage any interaction with us and start sniffing when she needs to go potty. Since she’s confined in a small space familiar to her, any sniffing where her snout is glued to the ground for a while in the kitchen is suspicious, so we should really bring her to the patio. This becomes a reliable telltale. This helps us from having to get her outside every 30 minutes or so.
Also for fun and as motivation for ourselves, I made a potty tracker. It also helps us track whether she’s been pooping normal or less than usual. The tracker helps us keep being motivated to have few accidents indoor, and within a few days of “Gotcha Day”, we have 0-2 accidents so far. If you’d like this template, you can download or get a copy for your own Google Drive here. If you need a refresher on how to do this, you can check it out here.
