One of the hobbies that I have developed in the last couple of years is gardening which sounds awfully mundane and fuddy-duddy-ish. It probably is but I'm balancing it out by learning to kayak.
The rules for my garden are simple: anything I plant must be edible and I don't weed. That's pretty much it. A huge assist was discovering the Square Foot Gardening method popularized by Mel Bartholomew, a retired engineer. His book takes you on a journey to a simple garden that is both productive and easy to manage. My ego and taste buds need the former, my career demands the latter.
One subject that that wasn't covered in his book though was how to handle cats. We have stray cats and we have the "indoor/outdoor" cats next door. And they look at my garden not as a miniature eden but as an enormous litter box. That has me feeling a bit perturbed. If I'm not into weeding - and my kids will assure you I'm not - then I'm definitely not into "scooping" my garden.
Plus they uprooted one of my lettuce. I said a few words after that, not the kind I would like my grandson to hear. Luckily, he was playing kamikaze on his bike. Personally, I think he's a little precocious but accident prone. At four, he's already been to the emergency room twice. Hurtling himself off the bridge in the play zone at the local mall and then trying to flip mid-jump to, according to his mother, impress a little girl led to the first visit and a broken arm.
Anyway, back to the cats....
Since I live with the Director of Operations for the local Humane Society, my means for "removing" the cats needs to be....gentle but effective. Plus I'm inside city limits and gun fire is frowned upon, especially with the high school across the street. I've tried cayenne pepper and I favor free range vegetables and edible flowers (did you know that nasturtiums are edible?) so I don't want to fence them though I make an exception for spearmint which is quite the pushy little weed.
So my question to you folks - any suggestions on how to rid my garden of the cats?
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