The Saga Of The Phantom Pooper, Or How To Keep Cats Out Of Your Beans

We've had a lot of rain up here in northern California, and I was noticing with great pleasure that my raised beds were draining beautifully -- they were holding water quite well, too, but while the ground around the raised beds was the same muddy slushy mess that comprises the rest of my backyard, the raised beds were keeping the new seedling plants from getting wet feet (so to speak) as they sprouted.

And then I started discovering holes in the garden, like the above picture. And I started discovering unpleasant, stinky surprises in those holes. And on one sunny day between rains, I discovered that the area where I'd planted bush bean seeds (specifically Tendergreen, Blue Lake, and Royal Burgundy varieties) had a whole cloud of little bugs hovering over it, a big hole with an unpleasant surprise, and young sprouted seed scattered all over the place. We have a lot of feral cats in the area, and so it was no difficult thing to figure out who was doing this.

Needless to say, I was mad. So I started searching online for ways to keep cats out of one's garden. I wanted to opt for cheaper options, as I'd already spent quite a bit getting my raised beds constructed in the first place, and I wanted something which I didn't need to replenish every 2-3 days (herbs, etc) or things which would wash away in the next rain (predator urine, cayenne pepper, etc), as those would require too much time and effort to keep in place.

In the meantime, over the space of a day or two, I watched the garden while researching. And I went out and grumpily repaired places where the cats were, ah, enjoying my garden's hospitality. It wasn't until one decided to use my lettuce patch and ripped out some sprouts while planting its own choice of stinky crop where I snapped, had some moments of extremely choice words,

So the internet recommended sticking chopsticks, plastic forks, or pieces of branches in the garden around the plants, close enough together that a cat would find it annoying to walk into the plot. That became my first choice of preventative measure. And it looked sorta like this, when implemented:

In other words, it looked positively ridiculous.

And it didn't work on the first night at all. The next morning, I glanced out the kitchen window and discovered this:

Not only had the phantom pooper just nudged forks out of the way, but one of them was upended neatly, the tines now buried in the ground under a... well, let's just call it an unwelcome gift. Also, you can see a couple bean sprouts that the cat kicked out of the ground while doing its dirty work.

More choice words occurred at this point. 

So I moved on to step two: more forks. While I won't bother showing a picture of this, you can envision double the amount of forks in the same place.

That didn't completely work, either; the cat still was wandering through that patch. So I pushed the forks a little deeper into the soil so they'd be harder to move around. That also did not work.

So it was time for emergency measures to be taken. I went and got some PVC pipe, and as a temporary test, built a frame and stretched some leftover landscape fabric around it to see if it would keep the cat out, like this:

I left forks inside of it just to make sure I would know if the soil had been disturbed. The outer enclosure seemed to have much more effect -- the cat stopped digging up my sprouting bush beans. Unfortunately, it moved on to the next plot down, where my cucumber and a young pepper plant are currently at, and started digging up the front of that. So I put more forks in the front of the next plot down, sprinkled some coffee grounds on all of the non-enclosed beds that currently had living plants in them (in the hopes that coffee smell might keep the cats at bay), and ordered some chicken wire.

It's been a few days now, and so far, the frame (with stuff around it) has successfully kept the cat out of the bean bed. The coffee combined with forks only stalled the cats for a day or two, and then the phantom pooper was right back to his/her business. And so, once the chicken wire arrived, construction began on the more permanent solution.

It's the same framework as the original style of frame, but enclosed on all sides with chicken wire (I opted for 2" hole wire for lightness and for simplicity's sake, plus it's cheaper than 1" hole wire). I can lift it out as needed, prop it up on one side or the other to get underneath it for ease of weeding, and the curved shape means that it'd be easy to lay shade cloth or plastic over, so I can use it in the heat of summer to shade more tender plants or in the chill of winter to offer a little extra protection and warmth to whatever fall-winter plants I'm growing. It's tall enough that it should be able to sit overtop most plants, although this setup may or may not work over my tomatoes once they start getting big (but I'm already developing a plan for a PVC tomato cage system that I can attach chicken wire around the bottom of, if necessary). And it has the side benefit that the plants underneath it will be protected from random birds, which is also a plus.

It's a little difficult to build with only one person, as bending 10' PVC pipe into a curve like that really requires a second set of hands, but it's not impossible, just difficult. Similarly, a second set of hands to assist with stretching chicken wire over the front and back panels is useful (going over the curve itself was surprisingly easy by comparison), but it's not impossible to do alone, just a bit more troublesome.

As you can see, I have no worries that I need to leave forks in the bottom of this bed with the cage in place now; there's no way a cat is getting in there to make any messes, nor is it likely that anything else will. Now I just have to make seven more of these so that the cats will no longer have access to my garden!

And now for a picture of raspberry flowers (I have two "Raspberry Shortcake" variety bush-style thornless raspberry plants that will be going in the ground soon) to close out this post on a high point!