Allotment problems

We have an invasion!

Not bodysnatchers, not even ground elder, simply cats.

I think, without any evidence, that one of the allotment cats has had kittens and now those dear little things are old enough to be out and about and what they’re out and about for is their lovely little kitten deposits which are turning up on several plots round and about. It’s a difficult one, because you need allotment cats or you have allotment mice, and any allotment holder knows that once you get mice, you’ve got problems. But nobody wants cat ‘doings’ in their vegetables, and so you have to find ways to discourage the cat, without harming it, or driving it off your plot entirely.

So what are the options?

There’s the encourage/discourage route: growing catnip and having a bowl of nice clean drinking water in an area of the allotment that’s an acceptable cat toilet as a kind of a carrot, while in areas that you want to exclude the cat from, you can grow mint – the really strong, square stemmed kind, in buckets, and cut it hard back every three or four weeks to keep the odour strong – peppermint and eucalyptus oils are really good cat deterrents so if you get a few offcuts of wood, even just small blocks, and you scatter them around the cat toilet area, with a few drops of peppermint and eucalyptus oil on them, you’ll find your cat problem evaporates – but so does the oil, so you need to keep renewing it or the cat will return!

Then there’s the physical barrier route – if there is a place that the cats are using constantly, cut some brambles or rose suckers and lay them across that spot so the cat would have a prickly toilet! It will soon be discouraged from that particular spot.

Cat courtesy of photogirl17

Labels: allotment-cats, allotment-deterrents, allotment-pests