Browsing Tag

gardening

Outdoors

A Cheap Way to Keep Cats Out of Your Garden

use kebab sticks to keep cats out of your gardenLast year our garden was full of cat poop.  There’s really not a nice way to describe it. We don’t have a cat of our own, but many of our neighbors do and their cats seemed to think that our garden was a giant kitty litter.  We decided this had to stop so we did our best to find solutions by talking to other people about it and by searching online for ideas.

Some of the suggestions seemed to make sense, while others were way out there.  One example was to drop by your local zoo and ask for some tiger feces.  The idea was to spread tiger feces all through your garden.  Apparently domestic cats are afraid of larger cats feces.  Who would have thought?  Needless to say I didn’t try that route.

Instead, my husband and I decided to go to our local dollar store and pick up a couple of packages of 100 wooden kebab sticks.   We stuck them into the ground pointy side up throughout our garden and we haven’t seen any cat poop in our soil since!

So, rather than spending a bunch of money to solve our cat problem, we spent about $2 and we can reuse the sticks every year.  The only down side is that if you’re not careful, you can put a few wholes in your hands when weeding your garden or when you are picking vegetables.  To be honest, I think I’ve hurt myself more by being careless than any cat has ever been hurt by our clever idea.

If you’ve ever had any trouble with cats in your garden, try this out.  I laughed one day when I looked over to see our neighbors trying out our trick.  It looks like it’s working for them, too!

Outdoors

Plant A Vegetable Garden

Spring is here and I am getting restless.  I can’t wait to get planting my little garden but I know it’s a bit too early for that yet.  When my husband and I moved into our home a couple of years ago, we decided to make the flowerbeds along the side of the house into a small vegetable garden.  I even dug up some of our grass along part of our fence to create more garden space.  We planted tomatoes, peas, carrots, green onions, green beans, spinach, and cilantro.  Although we don’t have enough space in our small backyard to make a garden we thought we would see how our makeshift flowerbed garden would turn out.  I’m sure our neighbors thought we were a little odd, but we didn’t care.  It’s amazing how much can grow in such a small plot of land.  We had so many tomatoes that we gave some away and had to freeze some because we couldn’t use them all.  Not only were we savoring fresh vegetables, we were saving money as we hardly had to buy any fresh produce all summer.  Even if you live in an apartment that has a balcony, it’s definitely worth your while to plant some vegetables.  You could use a five-gallon pail and plant a tomato plant!  Gardening gives you a sense of satisfaction and it helps you to get exercise!  It’s neat watching things grow that you planted and it’s a great excuse to get outside and get some fresh air!  If you enjoy using fresh herbs in your cooking, rather than buying them in the store, plant an herb garden.  You will save a lot of money and have fun in the process.  Another suggestion:  Buy your seeds from a dollar store where you can get 3 or 4 packets for a dollar instead of paying $2 to $3 for each one.  Last year I bought both and the cheap ones worked just as well.  Happy gardening!