Gardening with Cats

Our friends at Gardening Gone Wild have put up a new topic for this month's Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop: Pets in the Garden. Now THAT is a topic near and dear to my heart, although most of my feline gardening companions are gone from the garden now.


These are funny looking cats, I know. They're sort of gardening companions, as their pasture and paddocks are all around the edges of the garden, and they tend to come down to the fence and socialize with us as we go about the day to day routine outdoors. Mysteriously, my horse can read my mind--if I'm thinking about riding him, he goes down to the back of the pasture and becomes deaf to whistles, calls, apples in buckets...


Leggo and JennyManyLumps (our donkey-from-Mars) are the reasons I don't grow yew around our property; yew is toxic to horses and donkeys, as are many other plants. I don't worry really about them eating something they shouldn't; they have good pasture and are wellfed in winter, but I do have an aversion to yew.


Of our seven cats, only two of them go outside whenever they want to; they're the senior cats of the house and are quite savvy. They leave the birds alone but do go after assorted rodents: shrews, moles, voles, etc. Some of the others in the house go out with us, either on a harness (Mungus) or just hanging around the back garden. Two of them don't go out at all.


This is Niblets, who used to go outside and zip around the yard, go up trees, 'talk' to us, climb around in the barn...and then one day he tried to cross the road when a vehicle was coming. He survived but lost his back leg, so he lives life as a tripod kitty--very, very well. He roars around the house, zips up and down stairs, onto the table, onto the cat gym...but he doesn't have any lives or legs left to spare, so he stays inside.


And this is Spunky Boomerang. Spunky was one of two kittens we rescued from the roadside a few miles away, and he has never, EVER expressed any desire to go outside again, in the five years since we rescued him. Nope. Not a chance. He's my personal babycat, follows me all around the house, sleeps against me in chairs, at the desk, in bed, lays on towels in the bathroom while I shower...but go outside? No thank you, Mumsie. One day the patio door was open, some of the badnesses escaped, and Spunky went out onto the deck. He was scared and I had to rescue him from under the picnic table. I swear all the doors in the house could be open now and he wouldn't try to go outside. He figures he has it good, now.


Thistle goes outside regularly, and loves to follow me around when I'm digging in the garden. The cats who go outdoors probably dig in the beds to do their business sometimes, but it's not been a concern or an issue with us. Likewise if any feral cats are around; we live on seven acres, and are surrounded by fields and woodlands, and cat droppings bother me far, far less than dog droppings. 

Those who don't get to go outdoors without us tend to have a bit of outdoor envy; while those who go outside do perhaps tease the others just a little bit. What I'd like to do is create an area where we could let them out to romp around without harnesses or worry; that would require some creative designing, with some page-wire and posts, a shrub to lay under and lots of catnip to chew on. It hasn't been a huge priority though, and we have some work to do around the property that takes precedence. 

As for designing the garden with the cats in mind, I haven't worried about toxic plants. Cats don't seem to be as inclined towards eating plants that are toxic to them as dogs do. I've never had a cat poisoned by a plant outside or indoors, although inside to be on the safe side there are a few that I won't have around, like dieffenbachia and Jerusalem cherry. I tend to have planned more of the garden with birds in mind; creating safe places for them to feed and nest. When we had more cats who went outdoors, I made sure the feeders were far from trees or shrubs or other spots where fierce primal felines might try to stalk birds, but now, with Thistle 12 and Rowdy going on 11, I don't worry. They are too well fed and laid back to worry about chasing birds. Or maybe when we had chickens, they learned not to challenge winged creatures. 
Of course if they can't go outside, they can always watch bird television. Sometimes, there's an added pay-per-view Squirrel Channel, but that doesn't happen very often. 

And then there's Mungus, truly the smartest and baddest cat in the family. He's adorable. And mischievous. And somewhat spoiled by his 'daddy', my longsuffering spouse. (well, okay, maybe a little bit by me, too). They're totally bonded. In the years we've lived here, we've had as many as 12 cats at a time, and while we've lost a few over the years to old age or illness, we've lost three to the road. Including two of my hubby's favourites. We don't want to take any chances with Mungus, so we taught him to go on a harness in a matter of about fifteen minutes. He's quite content to go out on the harness and 'help' me in the garden. Occasionally, his nosiness gets the better of him, as in the day he went to say hello to our Donkey-from-Mars. She thought he was a coyote. He thought it was a good idea to retreat. 

My best gardening companion for years was Tigger, our sweet ginger marmalade bobtail. He LOVED to help me in the garden, which normally meant just following me around, sitting beside me, bumping and purring. So it was kind of fitting that he died out in the garden last spring, probably of a heart attack. He'd had a long good life, but it was still very sad. Like the others we've lost over the years, we buried him in the garden and planted a shrub in his memory. As my grandmother said, "I was always good to cats, and they were always good to me." I want that to be my epitaph.