The Voice Of Bitter Experience: don’t rely on your usual general retail merchants to still have seeds available in July or August. That whole “Burpee” rotating stand thingie is totally seasonal, and when you’re ready to buy lettuce seeds in August, Wal-Mart will have replaced the Burpee seeds and gladiolus bulbs displays with Back-To-School, and even, god help us, Christmas.
So either buy them now, or get them mail-order. I can recommend Jung Seeds as being amiable folks to do business with.
Or else investigate your local nursery/garden center. They usually keep the Burpee stuff around longer.
Well, I’ve got green beans, wax beans, “golden” beans, and “burgandy red” beans, and enough seeds for twice the space I have alloted for them, so I’m going to stop with those, but I’ll keep your suggestion in mind for next year.
Coming home from the store today I caught a cat using part of my vegetable garden as its personal latrine. Now, I appreciate that cats need to pee and poop but this is MY FOOD GARDEN and I confess my first impulse was to go into full attack mode and kill.
Animal lovers will be relieved to know that I did NOT indulge that impulse. I honked the car horn and it ran off. Judging my its skittish behavior and lack of collar, etc. I am assuming it’s a stray.
Here’s the problem - I need a cheap, effective, and preferably non-harmful to all concerned way to keep the cat out of the garden. While the additional fertilizer might be useful, the little beast is digging up the plants to deposit it, which means no vegees later. I’d love to go up to and say “See the compost heap over there? Please use that instead. Or that sandy spot behind the old shed. Or my neighbor’s yard” but of course that will not work.
I’m not particularly fond of either shooting the cat or calling the animal catchers, particularly since either solution wouldn’t stop another stray from moving into the territory. No, I want something to discourage ALL neighborhood cats from crapping in my garden.
Quick solution: you cover the soil’s surface with something Kitteh does not like to dig in. Sheets of newspaper, black plastic, like that. You can staple three or four sheets of newspaper together to make it sturdier. You can split Hefty Steelsacks, or use rolls of black plastic mulch (available at Menards, Lowes, etc.) Hold it down with chunks of brick, rock, etc., or make pins by cutting up (or bending, using metal fatigue as your ally) wire coat hangers (the skinny cheap drycleaners’ ones are perfect for this) into oversized bobby pins/deranged croquet hoops, then nail the stuff to Mother Earth.
You don’t need to achieve 100% coverage, just get it around the bases of the plants enough so as to disguise the soil’s obvious presence.
ETA: You actually do not want carnivore poop in your garden or in your compost heap, because it potentially contains pathogens.
Factoid drifts into mind, too late for the Edit window: I have also heard of people using tinfoil, but either they must have really tiny gardens, or else they own a tinfoil factory.
If I lay down newspapers or plastic in that manner the first thing that will happen is the landlord will show up, remove the “trash” from the building area, and get pissed off at the people “littering”. He is NOT a gardener. It took me two months get a modest compost heap OK’d. That sort of creative mulching will not work in my case due to human factors. If I explain that it’s to discourage a stray cat HE will shoot it (he normally carries a .45 with him, and he certainly does use it for “vermin” control on his properties).
I hate being difficult, but the easiest method to deal with this for me personally (tell the landlord) will result in a dead cat. At least he will kill it cleanly, he’s morally opposed to cruelty and torture, but he is NOT opposed to killing animals. Hell, he’s been known to shoot human trespassers.
This is exactly what the next door neighbor’s cat is doing. This is one of the reasons I get so pissed off with cats and neighbors like him. The cat has dug up my peas in spots and shit where they were. I threw the shit in his grass, and put my tomato cages over the peas for now. I can’t give you a no cost way to save you veggies. The animal blocking fence I had up last year isn’t up yet. That kept his digging shitting aggressive dog out of our yard. Now that the niece is 18 months old and going outside all the time, other’s are concerned about the dog which has attacked people and animals before. Ok so I got sidetracked.
You can buy some stuff that you put on the ground to keep cats away. I did this a long time ago, and don’t know if is suitable for being around food. Our neighbor has cats who poop on our front lawn, but our dogs discourage them from visiting the garden in back.
I’m actually not sure any kind of mulch would discourage a cat all that much.
Yeah. Back when I owned cats I tried putting tinfoil on the couch and kitchen counters to discourage them from getting up there. Worked for all of a day and a half, then they started considering it a toy, then they started demanding entire rolls of it in tribute.
Aren’t strong smells supposed to deter cats - like hot peppers and citrus juices? Maybe some cheap lemon “juice” in a bottle, or cayenne pepper from the dollar store, liberally applied around the plants would help.
Well, from the plethora of suggested chemical cat repellents on Google, I’m assuming that none of them work very well, because otherwise there would be a consensus, and there isn’t.
So, you could call the Lake County Extension Office and ask their Master Gardeners what they do.
Or you could contact Animal Control or the Humane Society and ask to borrow a live trap.
Me, if mulch wasn’t an option, I’d go with chicken wire in half-circles, over the beds, like mini-hoop-houses. Or else concrete reinforcing wire, which is sturdier and won’t get mashed down, although it requires a hacksaw or bolt cutters to cut up into chunks.
Can you maybe explain to your gun-toting landlord, very slowly and in words of one syllable, keeping a cautious eye on his gun hand, that the newspaper/black plastic is really mulch?
Sorry, that’s all I got. But–if it comes down to a choice between “kill a cat” and “grow food for your family”, you won’t get any condemnatory finger-wagging from me, that’s fer sure.
You know, I tried contacting them and the master gardeners about prior questions and have received no response.
The issue isn’t that he’s stupid or uneducated - quite the contrary, he has a degree from Purdue and he’s a smart guy - but rather the dichotomy between city and rural and how animals are treated. Some animals are pets and family. Some animals are for food and you do not sentimentalize them. Other animals are vermin, to be disposed of as efficiently as possible. For him, it’s strictly a matter of logic and cost-effectiveness - why spend time, money, and energy on repellent when a lead slug will solve the problem quickly and permanently? A bullet is cheaper than chicken wire and, properly used, 100% effective. I realize this is at odds with how many urban folk regard animals but I’m on th edge of country out here.
The plastic/newspaper looks trashy, that’s the problem - if I want to mulch I should buy a bale of hay or something. Of course, that won’t stop Mr. Dig, will it?
I’ll do a little more research. I do have a large bottle of lemon juice, I could try that and see if it works.
Geez, and I thought the ant infestation was annoying…
Maybe put down the newspapers or black plastic, then put a thin cosmetic layer of shredded bark or hay or straw or something on top of it?
Sorry the Lake County Master Gardeners aren’t being helpful. The Macon County MGs are like the Fantastic Four or the Justice League of America or something, waiting by their phone for the Batsignal, when they can leap into action.
Didn’t read the whole thread (sorry!), but for next year, look around for a free soil analysis from maybe the extension service. I had this done for a house I once owned, and they recommended ammonium nitrate in quantities that would draw federal scrutiny since the Oklahoma City bombing.
I pop the squirrels and cats with my pellet gun if they get into my garden. Nothing injurious- a couple of pumps (the gun is 10 pump maximum), and you can see the pellet in the air when fired.
Doesn’t hurt them, but tends to deter them.
(philosophically, I’m with the landlord. If I didn’t live in the city, I’d be using my 10/22.)
One suggestion to try before resorting to felinocide by proxy might be to acquire some metal screening or “hardware cloth” and lay it in the garden, then lightly spread mulch, compost, or leaves over the top of it. Cats don’t like anything that impedes their scratching up the soil or gets caught in their claws, so they’ll avoid the garden in favor of friendlier ground, and it will not be visible. You might even be able to get scraps of this free or very, very cheap, since you don’t care if it has holes in it. Check with your local hardware store, which should be replacing some damaged screens for customers.
The best way to keep the l’il buggers out (other than having a plethora of raptors overhead as we do here) is a motion-sensing sprinker, but that would require a cash outlay, and I’m aware you need to conserve on funds. That might be something to put on your wish list for the future, though.
Do you know who the cat belongs to? If so, you might try going to this person and informing them that your landlord is going to shoot their cat if he keeps finding it shitting on his property.
No. The cat has no collar or anything else to identify it, I have no way of knowing if it is a pet or a stray or a pet gone feral. Situations like this are, of course, why pet owners should collar and tag their pets, but hey, I have to question how much sometimes cares about a pet anyhow if they let it roam around like that, anyway. There’s more than just “gun-toting landlords” that kill cats in the great outdoors.
