Cats In The Vegetable Garden: 5 Tips To Keep Them Away
Even though these furballs are adorable, your cat or the neighbor's cat can cause damage in the garden. To prevent scratches on plants, droppings, and soil turned over at the base of your crops, some deterrent measures are necessary. Here are 5 tips to keep cats away from your vegetable garden without harming them.
1- Grow repellent plants
Domestic cats love to roam in gardens because they provide an ideal playground for hunting insects or mice, basking in the sun, or scratching the soft soil and doing their business. Repellent plants for cats are the first trick you can use to dissuade them from coming into your vegetable garden.
Simply grow here and there in your garden the plants that cats hate the most, such as:
• Common rue or Ruta graveolens.
• Coleus canina, which well deserves its nickname "terror of cats" because of its smell... reminiscent of a skunk!
• White mustard or Sinapis alba, which also serves as a green manure for your vegetable garden.
• Marigolds or Tagetes patula, which have a repellent effect on many pests.
To keep cats away from the vegetable garden, you can also plant aromatic herbs around your crops, such as lavender, rosemary, thyme, and lemon verbena. Thanks to their scent, these plants could help create a natural barrier against felines with sensitive noses.
2- Protect the seedlings with pepper
In a garden, cats mostly cause damage to seedlings and young shoots. To protect these fragile plants, you can use commercial repellents based on mustard or try natural alternatives. Among the tips mentioned online, you have a wide choice between lemon or vinegar water, citrus peels, chili pepper, and coffee grounds.
Coffee grounds recovered from your coffee maker are interesting for surrounding your plants and protecting them from felines. Not only does this trick cost you nothing, but the grounds also act as a natural fertilizer to enrich the soil and nourish your plants.
However, the most effective product to keep cats away from the vegetable garden and seedlings in open ground is not coffee grounds. It is a very common spice in our kitchens: pepper! Simply sprinkle ground pepper after watering and regularly reapply it, every 3 days on average and after each rain, until the seedlings sprout so that the felines leave your seedlings alone. This trick is said to be much more effective than commercially sold repellents.
To protect your seedlings, you can also install a bird net. This net, intended to prevent birds from scratching and pecking, also works for cats. The same trick (net or chicken wire) works on seedlings in trays that would be within claw's reach.
If you catch a whiskered intruder in the act of scratching, a jet of water will make it take its paws to its neck and discourage it from coming back to do its business at the foot of your plants, at least for a while...
3- Protect the plants with thorns
Another of the 5 tips to keep cats away from your crops is to spread a prickly mulch on the ground, which they won't want to step on. Thus repelled, they will not come to scratch your plants.
To create this anti-cat barrier, you can use rose prunings or chestnut burrs in autumn. Even a simple twig mulch can deter these animals with sensitive pads, provided you lay it thick enough.
4- Attract cats elsewhere
Another solution to prevent a cat from attacking your plants or flower beds is to attract it elsewhere with plants that cats adore.
To keep cats away from your vegetable garden, you can plant valerian (Valeriana officinalis) or simply catnip (Nepeta cataria) in another part of your yard! This herb has an irresistible attraction for felines.
If you want to avoid droppings at the base of your vegetables, set up a litter box with sand in a corner of the garden and attract them to that specific spot by spreading a few drops of bleach there.
Finally, if the intruder in the vegetable garden is your own cat, you can set up a part of the garden just for him. Provide a patch of turned soil and several wooden planks as scratching posts. You can also reserve a place for your cat to rest, preferably at a height because cats like to monitor their surroundings to feel safe.
5- Close the vegetable garden
Even with all these tricks to keep cats away from the vegetable garden, you will need to be persistent, especially if the local cats have developed the bad habit of squatting at your place. Don’t hesitate to try several methods and multiple natural repellents mentioned earlier at the same time!
As a last resort, if the felines are still there and you need to protect a pregnant woman from toxoplasmosis transmitted by their droppings, the most radical solution to get rid of the cats is to completely fence in your vegetable garden.
