Feline Visitors

I haven’t had a lot to do with cats. I watched my grandmother befriend a cat that would appear at her backdoor each day and I thought that was sweet. Friends have cats and if they want to park on my lap then that‘s fine.

Since shifting into my current home more than two decades ago, I’ve been surprised when a local cat visits my backdoor. It’s not as though I put out the welcome food bowl or even an available leg for them to swish against as they might like to do.

But I don’t mind cats in general. It’s just the cats that live close to my home that I’m a bit dubious about. I wish they were less fastidious about their own yard when deciding where to perform their, well, you know what…

I began to like my neighbor’s cat when I saw it lying in my backyard lapping up the sun or once in a while sitting outside my back door. I was happy for it to frequent my yard.

But I made an error of judgment. An old plant died and I bought a mandarin lime plant along with some potting mix. I put the old soil underneath the bark in my backyard and provided the perfect spot for cats to visit.

The first time I saw a local cat using my backyard the cat added insult to injury by turning its behind towards me. It didn’t help when I noticed a black cat visiting as well as another cat with a similar lighter coat to my neighbor’s cat. I didn’t appreciate the idea of three cats enjoying my backyard.

I checked Google and most web sites suggested moth balls, which contain camphor, as the best feline deterrent but for some reason the local supermarkets didn’t stock what I was looking for. The best I could find was moth balls enclosed in plastic containers but I wanted unencumbered moth balls. The phrase “nanny state” came to mind but I persisted in my efforts.

I found some moth balls in a discount store and bought a small pack to test out this theory. I noticed the warnings on the pack as I placed the moth balls around the area being frequented. The warnings played on my mind and internet searches confirmed that moth balls can poison cats and dogs. I felt a little relieved over the next week when I noticed moth balls sometimes meters from where I had placed them. Perhaps the cats were playing ping pong with them! I have since read that our local government regulations prohibit them being sold unless packed in a child safe encapsulated format.

Soon afterwards I watched a local TV show that discussed the benefits of placing orange skins around the garden to deter feline visitors. It seems that cats sniff around an area to work out whether they’re comfortable doing their business. Cats don’t like the smell of citrus so the garden will be cat free, at least in the way that I would like.

I’m happy to report that scattering orange and mandarin peel segments kept my backyard free. But I was also guilty of lapsing into a false sense of security after weeks of not seeing cats in my backyard. When I checked my backyard occasionally and noticed small sections of exposed soil I scattered some more citrus skins around. Since I couldn’t feed these skins to my worm farm I considered this an ideal way to recycle them.

A few years ago a gardener tidied up my backyard by placing black plastic and bark. Over time the black plastic slowly broke down leaving bare patches, or should I say cat heaven! I realise that a more permanent solution would be to replace the black plastic and bark or else change the back section of my garden to have beds protected by mulch.

In the meantime, I noticed a weed spreading a dense carpet over part of the back section and I was tempted to let it stay as I thought it was doing a marvelous job of protecting the backyard. So I monitored this weed carpet and even though more little tendrils went through the soil and encapsulated some pots as well as the plants that resided within, I let it grow.

A month or two on, I am on groundcover watch. I pull out tendrils that deliberately try to strangle pot plants or try to outrun the slight barriers in my garden between the mulched, barked back section and a grassed area. I also realise that grass in my backyard is not as environmentally responsible as edible ground covers or even raised garden beds.

But the good news for me is that I now have cats visiting my backdoor just to say hello, plus one has developed a new sport of playfully leaping around the lush groundcover bed. Watching the cat melt comfortably into the greenery brings a smile to my face. Now I am seeing the behaviour that binds their owners to them. Since the groundcover has removed the behavior that bothered me, I am free to enjoy the sideshow.

But if this rain continues as it has for some time now, I will have to do something radical to ensure that other precious plants don’t get swamped by the rampant ground cover. I wish that the universe erred on the easy option: lush ground cover that stops growing at just the perfect aesthetic point to ensure a good looking, functional back yard. But who am I kidding? If life were meant to be that easy, the cats would only be visiting my backyard to say hello to me and we would never need to mow our backyards. I reckon it’s easy to wish and much more painful to accept reality.