The Unadulterated Cat

The Real cat and the gardener

Peas, greens, parsnips, rhubarb… these are, the concerns of your average gardener.

Black thread, twigs, wire netting, incendiary mines… these are the concerns of your average gardener who has a Real cat. Or, rather, whose neighbour has a Real cat.

It is possible to cultivate your garden when there are Real cats around, but the price of celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated Real gardener14 remarked, “It's not just what they Do, it's what they do afterwards”, viz, the conscientiously clawed conical heaps, out of which the little yellow shoots of what would have been beans poke pathetically.

The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already been touched on. Other possible defences are:

Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we haven't had any moles since installing them. We've never had any moles, actually.

Real cats step over it.

Since it always rains incessantly imediately, this barrage is laid down, we've never found out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably there's some international Accord that no one's bothered to tell us about.

The point is that the cat's desire to get onto your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it shouts. Which leads us on to:

The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions when They Find An Impenetrable Barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious Seeds!!!

You can make little wire bootees for the beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your more valuable apple trees in demure corsets of wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up, and 3) the fact that plants grow through the wire.

This doesn't matter with things like onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes and they had to be dug up as a unit. But if you can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:

But we're not that kind of people.15