It’s no secret that I am not a huge fan of cats.  It’s not that I don’t think they are cute and cuddly, it’s just that I HATE them using my veggie garden as their own personal toilet.

I have tried various methods to keep the cats away (orange peels, cayenne pepper, etc., etc.)  My grandma even bought coyote urine for her garden.  Entertaining for sure, but ineffective and actually pretty disgusting.  Is coyote urine really that much better than cat pee?  I heard that there is a motion detecting water sprayer that works fairly well, but they are pricey.  I don’t like the idea of spending a bunch of money on cats when I don’t even own one.  There is also the method where you stick plastic forks with their handles down into the dirt every 6 inches or so.  This sounds like it might work, but I am not known for my grace and I can just imagine stepping on the forks, or worse falling over on them and getting myself impaled.

There is nothing more disgusting than going out to your garden to get fresh produce and smelling that awful cat smell.  For the longest time, nothing worked.

Finally, I found a method that worked.

After literally years of fighting the cats – going out in my pajamas and yelling at the cats, looking like the neighborhood crazy lady, chasing them down with water guns, sending my children out to chase them off, etc.  I finally found a method that worked, purely by accident.  I left some of that cheap wire fencing on the garden bed one night spread out over a freshly turned (but unplanted) bed.  When I went to plant it a few days later I found that the soil was still undisturbed. Finally I had stumbled on a cheap (or free) and super easy method of keeping the cats away.

This has been the only method that has worked for me.  You use cattle panel or some other wire structure (like chicken wire or inexpensive fencing) that you can lay across the tops of your beds and the plants can come up around or through it.   I have also just set wire tomato cages or wire trellises (lying down) around your planting beds. Because the wires are thin, the sun and water can still get to the seeds or seedlings.

Once the plants start to come up and gain some ground, the cats don’t seem as interested in the garden.  At that point you can remove most of the wire/cages.  If needed, the wire panels can be left on the ground and the plants will just grow up through them (assuming you used a wide panel wire, like cattle panel).  This method can be very inexpensive.  Once I started looking online, I found similar products on Amazon for quite a bit of money that didn’t cover very much ground.  But you don’t need to buy them.  Look for free wire products to use.  You can sometimes find inexpensive wire fencing at the dollar store that would work as well.  As long as it interrupts the whole nice, smooth bed of dirt that is so inviting to cats and makes it a pain for them to dig.

Free+Easy+Effective=Win!

Have fun defending your garden! Go forth and grow!

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Photo Credit:  Tambako the Jaguar