How to stop cats 'digging' up your plants

[KentGardener]

Hi All

cats digging in just the wrong place is a big problem in my garden.  I have tried so many different ways to stop them over the last 5 years.  Thought I would ask the SRGC collective for anything you have tried / failed / succeeded with.

(By the way I love cats so no suggestions of shooting or poisoning thankyou very much!)

with many thanks

John

[mark smyth]

oh well no suggestions from me then. Other than shooting I know someone who uses carpet grips and another who uses small beds of nail slightly buried here and there. Something I was told recently was get your own cat. They are supposed to keep all cats out of their own garden and deposit elsewhere. And finally .. an electric fence at cat height something I'm considering suggested by a farming friend

[David Shaw]

Difficult. From previous postings I believe John has a small suburban garden suggesting that the local cat population has nowhere to 'go' except peoples gardens.

It was probaly my suggestion that having your own cat(s) is the best way of keeping strangers out but we benefit from living on the edge of a village with plenty of fields round about and neighbours who either love cats themselves or don't particularly do gardening. The amount of cat damage in our garden is limited and does not cause a problem ( except when they (ours) get into the green house and onto the plunge!) and we accept it.

I can see that in a small garden heavily planted with 'special' plants it can be more upsetting and I don't see a way round it. I don't think the 'keep off' chemicals have much effect. Up here there is a practice of filling plastic bottles with water and laying them round the garden. I have no idea if they are effective at keeping cats off but they look ugly. Maybe a good water pistol would teach them a lesson.

Sorry to sound negative, Mark, but I don't see how an electric fence would work. They can jump you know.

[Anthony Darby]

Cats don't like gravel.

[mark smyth]

In Panto style - oh yes they do! Maybe they just hate me

[Anthony Darby]

Use coarser gravel.

[Martin Baxendale]

John, I've tried everything over the years and finally went with the 'get your own cat' approach.

Actually, my wife really wanted a cat, so the decision was made for me anyway. But it does seem to help. Our cat (female) chases other cats (bigger, more damaging males especially) away on sight (her sexual leanings seem a bit ambiguous) As we give her a litter tray in the house, she doesn't use the garden as a toilet too much, so on balance we seem to end up with a lot less cat poo in the garden than when we had no cat of our own but lots of unchased visiting cats.

If you love cats, maybe you should get one?

Here's how happy my wife was when we got Mitzi!

 

[David Nicholson]

Always seems to be more of a problem when you live in an estate type environment. I have had some success with carpet gripper in particularly heavily soiled areas. I have also had some success with old and dried tea bags soaked in Olbas Oil (not sure of spelling, but it's a cold/catarrh remedy). At one time I had success with small glass pill bottles containing about an inch of ammonia, buried up to their necks in the soil. Kitty used to leap a foot in the air when sniffing round those. BUT of course they always move on to the areas you haven't treated. I am not a cat lover (and I really wouldn't harm them?) but a 2.2 rifle might well have the best results.

[Paddy Tobin]

I have heard  the suggestion of putting mineral bottles filled with water on the flower beds, though they are unsightly and, to the best of my knowledge, not very effective. Apparently the reflective nature of the bottle and water is disconcerting to the cats.

There is also the option of one of those devices which emit a sound of a pitch which is too high for the human ear but can be heard by the cat and, again, is disconcerting to them. A similar device is manufactured to deter mice from the house or dogs from the garden.

And then, with apologies to you John, there is the older remedy of a small amount of lead in the cat's left ear.

Paddy

[Anthony Darby]

I would personally ban all outdoor cats as they kill too much wildlife.

[Martin Baxendale]

I sympathise a lot with Anthony on outdoor cats and think cat owners should act much more responsibly about how much they let cats stray. It is possible to excercise a lot of control over where your cat goes and how much nuisance it causes to other people - if you can be bothered. Unfortunately, a lot of people can't seem to be bothered.

We keep ours inside virtually all Spring when the birds are nesting, specifically to be sure she isn't killing young birds. If she is allowed out during nesting time it's only when we're out in the garden, and she'll stay close to us, so we can see she's not going into the hedges (if she does, we call her in and get her back with food!)

In fact, the first year we had her, we kept her in almost all year, to try to make her a 'house cat' rather than an outdoor cat exactly because I was concerned about her being a nuisance in neighours' gardens (having suffered myself). Now she's quite happy to stay inside most of the time, or just go out when we do in the Summer, and consequently doesn't seem at all inclined to stray into other gardens. She'll even go back inside to us her litter tray (filled with environmentally friendly shredded newspapers which go in the compost bin).

I will, however, let her out if I see another cat digging in the garden (especially around my snowdrops!) so she can do her territorial bit and see it off. But she'll generally come straight back in again afterwards, or is easily enticed back.

So luckily, I'm now in the happy position of having a highly trained guard cat. If I could just teach her to hold a watering can...

[mark smyth]

In the UK cats kill 53 million small mammals and birds annually

Hello Martin!

[Martin Baxendale]

Hi Mark!

I assume that 53 million is an estimate, unless the cats all belong to some gruesome cat-kill club and send in their annual totals. Even then, you'd have to allow for boasting.

Seriously though, that's a lot of dead birds and stuff. If people would just train their cats to stay indoors more, especially at nesting time. Trouble is, if you don't do it from when they're kittens, they get used to going out any time they like and make life impossible when you try to keep them in.

For a start, we never put in a cat-flap. So we were always able to decide how much ours was allowed out. She shows little inclination to go after birds in the garden when she is out, so I reckon making her very domesticated and not a semi-feral roamer has blunted her hunting instincts. She just watches birds. And they watch her. We have one big blackbird that regularly comes and sits on the fence to watch her through our window. They just stare at each other. I think the bird's trying to wind her up! Even when we had robins nesting just a few feet from the window, she never showed any real interest, even when the fledglings left the nest and were hopping and fluttering around all over the place.

[Maggi Young]

ANYTHING can be trained if you put your mind to it and invest a little time. I know this, I got Ian young and trained him myself. I go crazy when people say that "cats are wild creatures, they need to be out and hunt" RUBBISH! They hunt for sport, they are so fat they don't even kill fast and eat the prey. My Aunt's farm cats, who have REAL work to do, on mice and rats, never chase birds, they are too busy!
What would cat lovers/apologists say if I kept a bloody great dog and let it eat kittens and small children because "it needs to hunt, it's instinct"? They'd say plenty, I'm sure, and the dog would be shot and I would be in jail.Train your cats and keep them indoors, that's what i say. Martin proves you can do it. Bob Meaden, that clever grower from Penpont, in Dumfries and Galloway, says it is perfectlay acheivable and he has no trouble with his well trained cat at all. SO THERE!
I feel very strongly about this matter, you may guess.
I get more annoyed about the cats chasing the birds than about their totally irresponsible toilet habits, though those are bad enough. Never leave your sand pile uncovered, that's for sure.
When folk ask why I don't mind about the sparrow-hawk killing in the garden I explain that the bird of prey has a living to make and a family to feed but these blasted cats are chock full of cat food from, in all likelihood, more than one so-called "owner" and will still maim my birds. NOT ON!

[mark smyth]

now I'm really scared of visiting Aberdeen! Only joking. I'm with Maggi all the way. I hope John doesnt mind us side stepping. I explain to people too that Magpies eat eggs and chicks because they need to eat and it's Man's fault in a way for destroying habitats that leads to birds nesting in unsuitable places.

ps how do cats know prized/rare plants from everything else? Why does the rarest bulb/plant always die?