The kittens have been pushing the limits on things they’re not allowed to do.

Like go into our plant pots.

The problem is, if we’re not in the room, there isn’t much we can do about it!

I have a large, self watering pot that had 5 avocados that I’ve managed to grow to a decent size, until one of the kittens decided she liked it as a bed. We even tried putting Duct tape, with the sticky side up, to try and stop them, but that only lasted as long as the tape was sticky!

Today, we discovered a cat had dug deep into the pot, scattering dirt everywhere.

This is not what I had in mind when I bought the hardware cloth.

There is 1 avocado and a stick left in the pot. Whatever cat did the damage had dug down enough that I could see the stick still has live roots under it, so it might actually sprout leaves again. The other one has lots of leaves with tooth marks in them, but it has managed to survive. Hopefully, it will still survive this latest feline attack!

Unfortunately, this is not the only plant they dig in, but it’s the only one I can protect with a cage like this. Along with the avocado pot, I found a pile of dirt on the carpet under the umbrella tree. After the messes were cleaned up, I went into the living room not long after and found a new pile of soil from the umbrella tree, sitting on the shelf beside it.

*sigh*

The worst are the jade trees. We have a lot of those. The leaves are toxic to cats. They don’t eat them, but they do like to bite the leaves off the plant, then chase them around the house. They break off pieces of aloe vera, too. My younger daughter has her orchids in kokedama hanging in windows, and the kittens have been trying to get at them, too!

We have a spray bottle handy for when we catch them doing stuff, but several of the kittens have decided they don’t mind being sprayed with water at all, and just sit there, looking at us, while getting soaked! 😀

How do you keep cats from getting into things, when you’re not there?

This has put us into an interesting conundrum.

What are we going to do for a Christmas tree? There’s no way we can use our usual 6 ft artificial tree. We’ve decided to use my daughter’s 4 ft Ikea tree, and see if we can put it on something higher, and have some sort of guard to prevent cats from getting up to it. Except we don’t really have anything like that. Whatever we figure out, our usual custom is to put the tree up, with nothing on it, for quite a while before decorating it, so we can train the cats to stay out of it. That has worked before, but we haven’t had so many cats in the house before.

This would be a time to have one of those trees that hang from the ceiling! 😀

The Re-Farmer