Upgrading the cat defences
21.08.2023 - 11:57
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
For two glorious years, this garden was cat-free. And then just at the point where the garden was mostly ‘finished’ and all I needed to think about was playing with plants, a feral cat moved into the neighbourhood. And started leaving ‘gifts’ in the raised beds.
I had endless problems with cats in the last garden. They drove me to distraction, leaving poo everywhere, scaring the chickens and destroying plants with their digging. We tried so many ways of deterring them that I wrote a book about it – My Garden is Not a Cat Toilet: 101 Ways to Stop Cats Wrecking Your Garden, which I am currently serialising on new Patreon blog. You can also read Dave Hamilton’s foreword and my Introduction to the book. The rest will be behind a paywall for supporters only, until I get around to publishing a paperback/ebook version.
There are lots of solutions for dealing with cats in the garden (and I’m not anti-cat, I only talk about deterrents that don’t hurt the cat in the book), and the truth is that you do have to try a few to work out which ones work for you in your garden and for your problem cats.
As I have discrete raised beds I have been trying, for the last few months, to keep bare or recently planted soil covered so that the cat can’t dig in it. This has been reasonably successful, but I only have two net tunnels I can put over the beds. This has proved not to be enough, with the cat (of course) simply digging in another of the beds, and damaging the plants that were there before they had much of a chance to grow and fill the space. I also wanted to move one of those frames off the onions and onto the chard, which is being munched by the birds and is too tatty for us to eat. But I was worried the onions hadn’t grown enough to
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