protecting plants

Protecting the jade tree, and critter capers

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So… we’ve had problems with the more recent additions to our cat colony indoors. They’ve decided our plants are for them to play with and dig in.

One of the pots we’ve been trying to protect is has the parent jade trees that we brought with us when we moved. During the drive out, it got cold enough to kill some of the plants in the back of the van, and most of the jade tree died off, but it amazingly did recover and has been doing very well.

Now the cats are trying to kill it.

Mostly Cabbages, and her dirt digging, but the other cats have discovered that jade tree leaves make good toys. We’ve done a number of things to protect the plants but, with this particular pot, some cats – and we’re not sure which ones – have managed to knock aside the things we’ve used to protect it, and get right into the middle of the pot. Along with the soil being dug up, the stems of the plants were being bent outwards, with some getting snapped off.

Yesterday, I engaged in a bit of a rescue.

You can see cat toothmarks on a number of leaves!

I was able to get the pot outside – a job that required one daughter with a spray bottle to keep the cats at bay, while the other opened the doors for me.

The pipes that you see are the spare uprights from one of the shelves we put up in the old basement. The basement is too low for the full height of the shelves, so we never added on the top self. In trying to protect the several jade trees in this pot, I shoved 4 of the unused uprights from the shelf into the pot, and used them and some cotton yarn as supports.

I discovered they also work really well to water the pot. I can just pour water into a pipe to water from below. The pot is actually a self-watering pot, but the opening to the reservoir on the bottom is small and hard to get at.

In their efforts to get at the middle of the pot, the cats ended up pushing the yarn down the pipes, and they were no longer supporting the plant stems. All the stems were bent and spread outwards, like a massive spider. So I redid it, this time making sure to loop around some of the bigger stems. It should not slide down anymore.

I’m amazed by how resilient jade trees are!

After replacing the dug out soil in the middle, I had the thought that using some of the grass clippings and garden soil mix I had left over from “hilling” the potato bags might help keep the cats out of it. Then I gave the whole thing a nice shower with the hose, with water that had been warmed by the sun.

When it was brought back inside, one of the first things that happened was several cats going over to investigate.

Then start chewing on the grass clippings.

*sigh*

They were so determined to get at it, I ended up trying to put a leftover piece of wire mesh around the bottom. It wasn’t big enough, so I tried protecting the rest with a transparent recycling bag. We still had to make liberal use of the spray bottle to keep the cats away!

Of course, we couldn’t stay in the living room all evening, monitoring a plant pot. Coming back a couple of hours later, we found some determined cat had managed to get under the plastic and spread grass clippings all over the place.

And our vacuum cleaner is broken, with no budget to replace it until next month.

*sigh*

In the end, with the assistance of a daughter keeping the cats at bay while opening doors for me, we moved the pot into the sun room to keep it safe.

In the process, I discovered a piece of the jade tree had been broken off, so I stuck it into another jade tree pot; a smaller one with a plastic ring cut from the top of a Costco corn puff container to protect it.

That was yesterday.

This morning, I was awakened by the noise of cats trying to get through the screen between the basements again. There’s nothing I can do about that, so I tried to ignore it.

Then I heard the big thump.

Going into the living room, I found one of the pots with an aloe vera in it, on the floor.

Thankfully, between the dense plant and the plastic protector around it, it didn’t actually fall out of the pot and virtually no soil was lost.

As I put it back on the shelf, I saw the dirt.

The smaller jade tree, with its protective collar, had been dug into. Some small, determined cat managed to reach through the opening and get at the soil.

I moved the pot to the dining table, went back to clean up a bit, returned to the dining room, just in time to discover Susan – SUSAN!! – on the table, trying to get into the pot.

*sigh*

I ended up shoving some mesh fabric around the opening, but it looks like this pot is going to have to go into the sun room, too.

A while later, I went to do my rounds outside and found two cats on the platform under the basement window, looking at me. Possibly Turmeric and Susan. Or Saffron and Big Rig. It’s a bit hard to see through the two layers of mesh on the window.

*sigh*

I let the girls know they were there. The last time I tried to go into that basement to get cats out, I popped a kneecap on the stairs.

So… that was my start to the day. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: protecting the tomatoes

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I’m glad I “wasted” some time on the computer last night, scrolling through Facebook. I came upon a question in one of the local gardening groups I’m on, asking advice on how to protect their transplants if there is a frost.

Frost???

So I checked the forecasts, and instead of the somewhat cooler overnight temperatures I’d seen earlier, it was forecasting a low of 4C/39F, with possible frost in lower areas.

Yes, on the night of June 20.

The problem is, we don’t have a lot available to protect our garden beds. Most wouldn’t need it, but I was concerned about the tomatoes in particular.

Since we buy cases of water to keep in the van, we had quite a few empties that I’d used to help keep the aquarium greenhouses warm. I gathered all I could find and started filling them with hot water. It wasn’t enough, so I started filling gallon jugs. It still wasn’t enough, so I went scrounging in the van’s recycling bag and found some vitamin water bottles to use.

The girls set them out, while I found and filled more.

I really appreciate that yard light on the power pole. We’d have had to juggle water bottles and flashlights, otherwise! :-D

I don’t know what temperature we actually hit last night, but this morning, the tomatoes seemed fine. From what I’ve read, we didn’t necessarily need to use hot water in the bottles for them to be able to protect nearby plants, but if I’d used cold water from the well, they would have been ice cold, and I doubt that would have helped at all. As it was, it took almost a full minute of letting the tap run just to get hot water to the kitchen sink. It’s the farthest away from the hot water tank, so there’s a fair amount of pipe to clear of chilled water, first. And chilled it was!

We should pick up pipe insulation at some point. If only for the pipes leading to the kitchen!

Anyhow.

While doing my rounds this morning, I made sure to check the squash, melons and gourds. So far, they look like they handled the chill all right, but we’ll see over the next couple of days. We’re supposed to get hot again, though today is supposed to reach a high of only 15C/59F, so there isn’t going to be a jump from one extreme to the other.

Another thing to keep in mind as we build our permanent garden beds. Being able to have and use different types of covers, to protect from critters or the weather, as needed.

I look forward to when we can set up a polytunnel or greenhouse, too.

All in good time. It’s only our second year gardening, and we’re learning lots that will be useful when it comes time to build permanent garden beds and structures.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: netted

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The heat has kept us indoors, for the must part, but a daughter and I did make a trip into town for some errands. I took advantage of the trip to see if the dollar store had stocked up on pinwheels and whirlygigs. They have not, but I did get their last hula hoops, to use as supports in the garden beds.

The post office was one of our stops, and happily, the mosquito netting we ordered has finally come in!

My daughter had ordered it to protect our lettuces in the retaining wall blocks, and the beets planted near them, from deer.

We used the T posts that I was never able to remove when we cleaned up the fence that used to be around this garden. Like most of what we’re doing this year, this is temporary, so we just used rope, tent pegs and clothes pins to drape it over the plants. It was long enough that we cut some off at one end, to use somewhere else. Holes and slits were cut into sections of it so it could be tied to the ornamental apple trees.

It should be interesting to see how it holds out if we get the potential storms over the next couple of days. I don’t expect the clothes pins to hold, but it’s attached to the trees solidly enough, it shouldn’t blow away completely. Meanwhile, it should be able to withstand normal rain and winds.

Even though we were doing this in the shade, it was still ridiculously hot, and we didn’t even try to do anything else outside.

I think the different things we’re using to startle away the deer seem to be working. The tulip cam is being triggered by wind blowing the dandelions in front of it. Other than that, we’re seeing the odd cat going by, or a bird on the ground in front of the camera. Nothing is going for the tulips, and aside from that one day, there have been no deer picked up by the camera. Not even a skunk, and I saw two of them in the yard, yesterday!

I’m thinking of moving the camera to overlook the big garden. Depending on where I set it up, it should be able to cover the beds near the house, as well as anything large enough that goes near the far beds. That should tell us if deer are still trying to go through the old garden area or not.

The forecasts have changed again, and they’re now predicting storms 2 days from now, instead of over the next couple of days. Once things cool down some more, and we go out to do the evening watering, we can move the trail cam over. The leftover mosquito netting is so light, I might just set it over the last spinach bed as a floating row cover, until we can build another wire mesh cover.

If this netting works out, we will order more. If not… well. We tried! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Desperate Measures

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One of the down sides of having so many cats in the house is how much they “love” our houseplants! We’ve had to get increasingly creative to protect them. The smaller ones ended up getting hung up. Thankfully, my daughter’s orchid kokedama are very light, as they ended up being hung from a curtain rod we don’t use. I had several succulents, one of which was apparently delicious to cats. I’ve managed to save two, while a third ended up being totally destroyed.

The problem is with the larger plants. I have a big umbrella tree, we have a whole bunch of aloe vera (less than we started out with) and several jade trees. We’re down a few jade trees, too. :-( I also had 5 avocados growing in one large pot. They had been doing very well, too.

Then Cabbages happened.

She has a thing for digging in dirt. She’s not interested in the plants themselves. She just wants to dig. The other cats like to bite the aloe vera leaves, which at least won’t harm them, but they also like to break of jade tree leaves, and play with them like cat toys. Jade trees are not good for cats! None of the other cats have Cabbage’s obsession with dirt digging. Thank God for that, or I wouldn’t have any plants left!

We’ve tried many things to deter them. Our aloe vera now all have protective rings of plastic around their bases (except the biggest one, which is so big, with so many babies growing under it, it can protect itself!), cut from those cheese ball and pork rind containers from Costco we’d been keeping to use as garden cloche. They’ve been coming in handy for a lot of other things!

The umbrella tree got a ring of 1 inch wire mesh around its base. The kittens would still jump over it and sit in the middle of the umbrella tree but, as they’ve grown bigger, they seem to have stopped doing that. The smaller plants got the plastic containers put over them as cloche, but some of the cats figure out how to knock those off – and the pots under them. The larger jade trees got various things stuck into the soil to both support their stems, which were being pushed over by cats sitting in the middle of the pots, and to make things difficult for the cats to get in.

The pot the avocado were growing in is a large double-layer pot. The inner pot holds the soil while the outer pot has a reservoir for water, so the roots can be watered from below. In one corner is a triangular piece that holds a float in place, and covered the opening where water is poured into the base.

This pot is on a shelf by the dining room window, along with a number of other plants. Eventually, though, we were down to just one other plant on the shelf; another jade tree. To stop the digging, we tried things like putting duct tape, sticky side up, over the dirt. The jade tree got a plastic collar, which kept getting knocked out of place, so we tried wrapping it with plastic, and even sticking in dozens of bamboo skewers in all directions, to dissuade the digging. Nothing worked for long. We even ended up putting the pot on top of an upturned bucket to raise it higher above the window ledge that cats like to lie on, but Cabbages is very determined, and still managed to get in to dig!

The remaining two avocados got a shield of hardware cloth around the perimeter of the soil. That worked for a while, until Cabbages discovered she could just jump over the top. We ended up putting a box over the top, but it was too late for the avocado. We just needed to stop her from making a mess. When she started digging, she throws dirt everywhere! She knows not to try for it while we’re around, too, so we’d find the mess in the morning, of after we’d been outside for a few hours.

Well, she still managed to get the box off the top and get into the dirt again. She also got into the jade tree again. So today, my daughters got the pot outside. The remains of the avocado were removed, and the jade tree was transplanted into the bigger pot. The hardware cloth got wrapped around it again, and the extra piece I had left from the roll got folded over the top as a cover. Then it went back to the shelf at the dining room window.

This evening, I went into the dining room only to find David lounging on the table – they are not allowed on the dining table – so at first I missed it. My husband was coming in behind me and saw it right away. The hardware cloth that was on top was gone, the rest was askew, and there was dirt, everywhere.

I was not a happy camper!

This time, it looked like Cabbages got under the mesh. The cover for the water reservoir was knocked completely off, too. We found the wire mesh that had been on top, rolled up under the dining table, with Tissue curled up inside. !!

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The hardware cloth got placed around the jade tree again, but instead of putting it on the inside of the put and pushing it into the soil, it was jammed between the inner and outer pots. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long enough anymore, so the piece that had been over the top was squeezed in, too. Then, we got the remains of a roll of 1 inch wire mesh and used that to create a top.

The wire mesh on the sides has been pushed down quite far between the two layers of pots, so there’s no way a cat is getting under it or lifting it out. The 1 inch mesh on the top is wider than paws, so if a cat tries to jump on top, it will hold the weight, but little paws will tend to slip through, which will be a deterrent.

The down sides are, we can no longer use the opening in the corner to water into the bottom of the reservoir, and watering from the top is going to be a challenge! We also can’t reach the plant to tend it. The top is held in place with a couple of twist ties, but the wire ends along some edges were also bent inwards, to help hold it in place. It can be taken off, but it’ll be a pain in the butt.

It should, however, finally be safe from Cabbages and her digging!

This poor plant!

The Re-Farmer