I brought home some supplies to make an herb container garden from my visit to the Family Roots Nursery a few weeks ago. And make a container garden I did.
Now, we have four cats in the house, so the safety of house plants is always an issue. (We make sure to not bring in anything that is poisonous to the cats, so safety of the cats isn’t usually an issue. Unless I catch them chewing on the plants, that is!)
I thought I was being really smart. I put one of the containers tucked into a corner shelf above the kitchen sink…
…and the other one went up really high.
Not high enough.
Cats like chives and dill. They do not like rosemary, cilantro, or oregano. But those chives… yum yum!
And the fluffy dill that was next to the chives? Not so fluffy anymore.
But the rosemary is doing great! They don’t seem to like rosemary.
I do have another of those corner shelves. The rosemary container didn’t get put there because the rosemary was too tall to fit. But I did put a geranium there.
(It hasn’t been safe, either, which means the shelf is not the magic factor keeping the cats from eating my plants. It’s simply taste. Darn things!)
We devised a plan. We set out upside-down mousetraps near the plants to keep the cats away.
Don’t worry, the goal here was not to trap the cats. Or even hurt them. All I wanted to do was scare the stupid things so they wouldn’t eat my herbs!
The theory is that they’ll jump on the microwave on the way to the high herbs. The vibration will trigger the mousetrap, which will jump and make a loud noise. The movement and noise will scare the cat, and my herbs are safe. (There’s also on on top of the cabinet, right next to the container.)
We also tried to protect the geranium.
Did you notice I said tried?
That’s because it didn’t work.
The first night, we heard a trap go off. The next morning, we found it was the one on top of the cabinet (the one on the microwave hadn’t budged), and there was no new carnage.
Today, however, is a different story.
There were more chives on the floor.
And my geranium had been attacked again.
But the mousetraps were just as we had left them!
Aargh! If only I knew which cat this was! Maybe I should flip the mousetraps right side up…
Okay. Maybe not.
Next, we will interrogate the suspects…
