Garden

Jofirey wrote:

"Mr Pounder" wrote in message
. com...
Hi

I would appreciate any help on what is probably an old chessnut.

I am not much good at gardenening.
We moved home last year and now have quite a nice garden, it has
cost money and a lot of work.

Cats are insisting on digging up my flower beds and pooing
everywhere.
I have tried:
Leaving a length of hose pipe on the lawn, cats think it is a
snake ............ errr yes okay.
Kat - A -Pelt ............... did not work.
That green gel stuff in a bottle ....... did not work.
Talking to the cats ........... did not work.

I have a Scare Cat on order.

Has anybody any ideas?

Would pepper work?

I don't want to hurt them.

Appreciated

Steve




I saw some plastic matting in a garden catalog yesterday that you
supposedly put in the ground around special plants to keep the cats
away. It has soft plastic spikes that stick up out of the ground.

I suspect most cats would think it was a funny as I did.

(They were also attempting to sell a fold up wooden clothes dryer
like the one I paid less then $10 for at Kmart. "Still made in
Maine from real white pine!" for $79.95 plus shipping and handling)

Jo

IIRC, the one I had was made of aluminum, and cost under $10 when I
bought it years ago! (Seems to me, one made of wood could develop
splinters, thus snag your "delicate" hand-washables - like hosiery,)

wrote in news:4ac6487e$0$1604
:

The link doesn't work probably because it is broken across two lines.

Sorry about that. Was probably juggling responses in several media (email,
Facebook, telephone) and missed that, as my newsreader doesn't take care of
that automatically.

"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote in message
m...


Jofirey wrote:

"Mr Pounder" wrote in message
. com...
Hi

I would appreciate any help on what is probably an old chessnut.

I am not much good at gardenening.
We moved home last year and now have quite a nice garden, it has
cost money and a lot of work.

Cats are insisting on digging up my flower beds and pooing
everywhere.
I have tried:
Leaving a length of hose pipe on the lawn, cats think it is a
snake ............ errr yes okay.
Kat - A -Pelt ............... did not work.
That green gel stuff in a bottle ....... did not work.
Talking to the cats ........... did not work.

I have a Scare Cat on order.

Has anybody any ideas?

Would pepper work?

I don't want to hurt them.

Appreciated

Steve




I saw some plastic matting in a garden catalog yesterday that you
supposedly put in the ground around special plants to keep the cats
away. It has soft plastic spikes that stick up out of the ground.

I suspect most cats would think it was a funny as I did.

(They were also attempting to sell a fold up wooden clothes dryer
like the one I paid less then $10 for at Kmart. "Still made in
Maine from real white pine!" for $79.95 plus shipping and handling)

Jo

IIRC, the one I had was made of aluminum, and cost under $10 when I bought
it years ago! (Seems to me, one made of wood could develop splinters,
thus snag your "delicate" hand-washables - like hosiery,)


The Scare Cat has arrived.
I dropped it and one of the eyes dropped out and broke!
Superglue worked, I will re-install the eye tomorrow.
Made in China.

Steve

wrote in news:4ac6487e$0$1604
:

The link doesn't work probably because it is broken across two lines.

Oh, I just double-checked and I did remember to put angle brackets around
it. So it's just a matter of a lot of newsreaders not doing automatic
reassembly across broken lines.

Newsgroups do have a technical convention of limiting lines to 80
characters, due to both the width of old teletype terminals and limitations
in ancient newsreader software.

I'll have to see if there's a newer version of Xnews that might address
this.

Here's the manufacturer's page:

http://www.contech-inc.com/products/scarecrow/

"Mr Pounder" wrote in news:1hsxm.101031
:

This gismo seems to be ideal, thanks a lot.
I wonder if it will blast people walking past my house?
Us Brits only have small front gardens.
If it does blast the people walking by, I may be able to regulate the
blasting.

Maybe mount it at the edge of the lot facing inwards, so passersby will be
behind it.

"ScratchMonkey" wrote in message
.. .
Here's the manufacturer's page:

http://www.contech-inc.com/products/scarecrow/

Thanks, saved.
The Scare Cat is to be installed tomorrow.
The wife has been instructed to buy loads of oranges, peel will be laid
down.
I thought of lemons?
We will see.

Steve

"ScratchMonkey" wrote in message
.. .
"Mr Pounder" wrote in news:1hsxm.101031
:

This gismo seems to be ideal, thanks a lot.
I wonder if it will blast people walking past my house?
Us Brits only have small front gardens.
If it does blast the people walking by, I may be able to regulate the
blasting.

Maybe mount it at the edge of the lot facing inwards, so passersby will be
behind it.

Yes of course.

Thanks.

Steve

In rec.pets.cats.anecdotes Mr Pounder wrote:

The wife has been instructed to buy loads of oranges, peel will be laid
down.
I thought of lemons?
We will see.

Fresh-squeezed orange juice!!

Joyce

--
In war you kill the people who are the victims of the tyrant you
claim to be fighting against. -- Howard Zinn

"Mr Pounder" wrote in message
. com
"Yowie" wrote in message
...
In . com,
Mr Pounder typed:
Hi

I would appreciate any help on what is probably an old chessnut.

I am not much good at gardenening.
We moved home last year and now have quite a nice garden, it has
cost money and a lot of work.

Cats are insisting on digging up my flower beds and pooing
everywhere. I have tried:
Leaving a length of hose pipe on the lawn, cats think it is a snake
............ errr yes okay.
Kat - A -Pelt ............... did not work.
That green gel stuff in a bottle ....... did not work.
Talking to the cats ........... did not work.

I have a Scare Cat on order.

Has anybody any ideas?

Would pepper work?

Cats (apparantly) hate the smell of citrus, so perhaps putting
orange peel on and in your garden might discourage them. Youcan also
buy orange oil fairly cheaply - and it also acts as a pesticide.
Spray that around, and it should keep all but the most determined
cat off your garden. You may also want to try laying something akin to a
fine chicken
wire mesh over your garden bed (or just ever so slighly beneath the
top of it), which prevents the cats from digging in your flower beds.

Apprantly going to the zoo and collecting some 'big cat' effluent and
sprinkling it around will discourage smaller cats.

And yet another option is of course getting a cat yourself that will
claim your garden as their territory and scare off the other cats.
This of course may defeat the purpose :-)

HTH

Yowie

Yow

Thanks for that, I will try the orange peel.
Getting a cat is not really an option, the wife says no due to her
wonderful spotlessly clean wooden floors.
We were going to get another dog, we lost our wonderful Lucy dog four
years ago - it still hurts.

Sorry to hear about your Lucy. Many of us here cat people (I'm posting from
RPCA) also have dogs that we love just as much, so we can sympathise

A dog would make marks on the wonderful spotlessly clean wooden
floors:-(

Yes, but they would be dog marks, not cat marks. There's a difference :-).
(please do not question female logic, you'll only end up hurting yourself)

Where would one buy orange oil?

There's the usual 'herbal essences' type places, but they are going to
charge you through the nose for 'top quality' orange 'essential oils' which
you don't need - you just need the lower quality stuff because you aren't
using it to make a perfume or heal someone's aura.

Chemical companies and cleaning companies are good bets. Less pure orange
oil might also be known as 'orange terpenes' or 'd-limonene' and will
probably be just as effective because its the *smell* the cats don't like.
Be aware, though, that orange oil is not the perfectly safe, can use on
anythign and everything with no risk stuff - if you do go down the orange
oil route, please read the safety instructions first. The orange oil if used
neat will happily strip the natural oils out of your skin which can cause
irritation, and lead to dermititus. It will also melt some plastics. There's
a reason why its an industrial solvent!

Before you waste your money on buying the oil, though, try the citrus peels
or even make an 'orange soup' by putting orange peels & some water into a
food processor and spray the resulting mess around. If it has no effect at
all on the number of feline visitors, don't waste your money on the orange
oil, try the motion sensitive sprayers. Or the lion pee.

Good luck.

Yowie
--
If you're paddling upstream in a canoe and a wheel falls off, how many
pancakes can you fit in a doghouse? None, icecream doesn't have bones.