With spring coming, lots of us are thinking gardens already, and that also means we should be preparing to keep kitties OUT of our tender beds.
Cats love the textures and smells of garden soil and flowers, and may decide to destroy your precious babies by digging in the dirt, leaving waste deposits, or napping on soft plants. But the cats’ sensitive noses can also detect smells from plants and other ingredients that they like much less, and it might keep them out of your plants.
Here’s a list of some of the plants that have odors that discourage cats from coming near.
- Citrus
- Bananas
- Mustard
- Pine
- Menthol
- Eucalyptus
- Capsaicin (found in hot peppers)—hot pepper spray will dissuade them from chewing…
- Fresh herbs, such as mint, rosemary, thyme, and lavender
- Flowers with aromatic foliage, like Russian sage, lavender, citronella, and geraniums don’t appeal to cats.
You can also try other methods, such as barrier plants. Flowers with thorns or prickly foliage, like the sea holly, globe thistle, or tropical grevillea, are resistant to cats (and other nibbling animals). If you’re trimming your roses, you can lay the canes along an area you want the cats to stay away from.
Who likes getting sprayed with water? Not cats! The upside of using a movement-triggered sprinkler is that your flowers will get a drink whenever
an uninvited visitor approaches. The downside is that you will get sprinkled if you forget to deactivate the device before you go out to pull weeds. (oops!)
Just like on your counters, a layer of aluminum foil or sticky tape will also
discourage sitting where they don’t belong. Other physical barriers like floral wire or popsicle sticks stuck in the dirt making it impossible to get a good lie-down spot. Even scattering pine cones will help.
Of course, you can always create part of your garden just for kitties that will give them a place to rest, and perhaps leave the rest alone. Just give them a partly shady bed with a soft mulch of grass clippings, dotted with safe edibles like cat grass, pansies or catnip.