Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Banishment of the Cat


(Above, our soda bottle tomato pots..)
I have enjoyed the company of our cat while I've been working outside. She follows me around and watches what I'm doing, sniffing here and there. Fun. However, there have been a couple places in the empty beds that have been used for a feline toilet. Yesterday morning when I went out to check on the newly planted bed I was horrified to find a huge mound directly in the center of it. Then I realized that it was in the ONE spot that I hadn't planted on that end of the bed because I'm saving the space for a bigger plant to go in. Still, I grounded the cat indoors until my plants are up and bigger. It's a long time for her as she loves being outside.

Per the Farmer's Almanac, I should plant most of my vegetables around May 15-19th. This is their best recommendation based on frost dates and the phase of the moon. I had no idea that the moon phase made any difference in how well your plants do! That's a little over my head. In the experimental spirit of this project, I'm going to go ahead and put all my transplants out at the end of this week and shelter those of them that are not cold hearty and then plant the rest of my seeds around May 15th.

I really want to plant potatos this year but don't have room in my yard. I'm going to try to find a place where I can plant a couple rows of them. There is a community garden about a five minute drive from my house I will look into or I might plant some in my sister's garden.

Yay for the rain today keeping all my little germinating seeds moist!!!

3 comments:

robin hood said...

The other solution to the cat problem is to stick short bamboo sticks in the ground between the new plants. That way the cat can't "settle" to do the business.

Works for me. And the sticks only have to protrude about 10cm to be effective. So they're not visible when the plants grow.

Anonymous said...
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Liz said...

Thanks for the tip on the bamboo sticks. I'm going to try it.