GGG -- Boo Boo Kitty sounds like she earned a well-deserved retirement after years of being on duty. I have my other two kitties relegated to the indoors for medical reasons. Someday Starbuck will have to retire but she's only about 4 so hopefully she still has years of service to my gardening cause ahead of her. rjinga, love your babies too. Especially the white one staring into the camera. So far I haven't been able to train A.J. to stay out of my daylily field so I feel your pain. I can't tell you how many buds he's broken as he bounds by. He only showed up on our property as a starving pup last April and we're still working on some "issues". At the end of daylily blooming season last fall I put nylon pantyhose footies over all of my developing seed pods that I hybridized just like I always do to protect them from insect damage. Well, A.J. must have gotten bored and thought they looked fun to play with so when I got back from work one day I found somewhere between 30 or 40 nylon stockings littering my field, complete with huge broken off seed pods inside, slightly chewed of course. I could have killed him!!! All that time spent planning my crosses, gathering pollen, pollinating and waiting...all for nothing. Aaargh! I would have had far fewer casualties with the bugs, so this year no panty hose. Eventually maybe I'll get it fenced off with low voltage electric wire and hopefully he and any hungry deer will get the hint quickly. He only knows the difference between cats and everything else that moves. He actually ran down a HUGE wild turkey that just happened to walk out of the woods one day while we were on a walk. That was the day I learned my sweet, submissive wouldn't-hurt-a-kitten stray pooch had some serious hunting dog in his gene pool. The turkey and I just stood there and looked at each other for a minute, we were both so surprised by the other's sudden appearance. But the instant he got nervous and decided to run away he was doomed. A.J.'s chase instinct kicked in and they both disappeared over the hill just as the bird took flight low to the ground. I was concerned about the dog because those turkeys can actually inflict some serious damage when threatened. I looked and looked for him for over an hour with no luck. Finally later that evening I walked out of the house to look for him again and he was laying in the yard next to a giant turkey carcass. I was shocked! Not only had he killed it but he dragged it back home over a mile and that bird was much bigger than he was! So....who's craving a turkey sandwich? Danielle

Ive found a couple things that help, Jennifer, but still havenÂt found any way to keep them from pooping all over my front lawn! I probably shouldnÂt even be posting here, because this is a BIG TIME pet peeve of mine! I did a LONG post on a thread a few years ago, and I searched for it, but canÂt find it. IÂm not even sure it was on RMG. I think it might have been on the Perennials Forum when I was still posting there, but it was a long thread with (sometimes vicious) rants from both people who have a problem with "other peopleÂs" cats, and the "other people" who think they have a right to let their cats roam far and wide! IÂm one of the first of those two! I believe people who have cats should be required to control them and clean up after them the same way people who have dogs are required to do! IÂd say more-----but IÂm going to try to be civil!!! But I truly donÂt understand why cats should be exempt from "owner responsibility!" The neighbors right next to me, with whom I get along very well, have one indoor kitty and one outdoor one. Every now and then the indoor one escapes and has apparently taken a liking to hiding under my back deckÂwhich is a total maze of scrap lumber! Whenever it happens they come right over to get him, and I donÂt have any problem at all with that, tho I donÂt have a clue what theyÂd do if the cat ever decided it didnÂt want to come back out! ThereÂs no way in the world they could crawl under to get it! (I have warned them that I occasionally put D-con under there to be sure thereÂs not mice living under there!) And then thereÂs their outdoor kitty who roams everywhere! I think thatÂs the one who does most of the pooping in my front yard, tho I have seen a couple other ones roaming at times. I get SO tired of having to pick up "other peopleÂs" poop! I picked up enough of my own poop when I had a dog! If I donÂt pick it up, it gets all over my lawn mower wheelsÂand my feetÂwhen I cut the grass! The first full summer I lived here it was even worse! It took me a year to figure out that the tiny pond thatÂs in my front yard was the nighttime watering hole for cats from far and wide! Once I figured that out, I covered it with chicken wire, and that got rid of a few of them! Looks great!!! Then, last spring, the neighbor kids on the other side decided the bare soil under the pine in my front yard was a great sand box! Once they started digging in it and loosened up the soil, the catsÂlots of catsÂdecided it was their own private litter box. Big mounds of dirt and sh** were building up under it. Several times I cleaned up several grocery bags of dirt and sh**! I was absolutely determined I was not going to keep doing that all summer, so I first tried dumping bottles of cayenne pepper on the soil surface after I had cleaned it up. I got the cheap kind you can get for 50 cents a bottle at dollar stores. The surface of the soil was completely red a few times, and it worked for a few days, but not for long! It would blow or wash away, and theyÂd be back! At that point, and madder than ever, I decided to go back to something I had used in the pastÂas Jennifer has already mentioned! If you keep the soil wet, the cats will stay away. They want nice dry "litter" to dig in! I set a little sprinkler under the tree, and ran it long enough to wet the top couple inches whenever it dried out. That kept both the cats and the kids out of there! Once the surface had hardened enough again, I was able to leave it dry out, and the cats went back to using the grass! I never have found a way to keep them off of the grass! IÂve dumped pepper on the places where theyÂve pooped, but they just move to a different spot. I wonder if you can buy cayenne by the half-yard!!! At one point I was considering a nuclear weapon, but I was afraid that any cats not destroyed in the initial blast might survive the radiation, mutate, and begin procreating exponentially! Seriously, from things I've found other people reporting online, I do believe a motion detector sprinkler would work. IÂve considered it, but have never gotten around to getting oneÂand they need to be left connected to a charged water line all the timeÂwhich I hate to do when IÂm out of town, just in case anything ever broke! A couple times when I happened to look out the window (usually after dark) and see a cat on the front lawn, I ran down in the basement and turned the sprinkler system on for a few seconds! By the time I came back up and looked again, the cat was GONE! This year I donÂt even have the sprinkler system turned on yet! I"ve also read about orange scent working, and somewhere I read that the "orange cleaner" worked, so I got a bottle and sprayed where they had pooped on the lawn, and, as with the pepper, they just went somewhere else. And that orange cleaner stuff isnÂt cheap! So I guess for the garden, my best recommendation, aside from the motion sensor sprinkler type thing, would be to keep the surface wet enough to deter the catsÂbut depending on what was planted there, youÂd need to be careful to not be keeping it too wet all the time. I think a thick layer of bark mulch would be a fairly good deterrent. IÂve never had any poop in my flower beds which are all mulched. I do occasionally find poop in my BACK yard, and when I do, I know itÂs from the first neighbor I mentioned. Then I use the fling-it-back-over-the-fence system!!! (But I make sure IÂm not seen Âcause I want to stay friends with them!) But I really do think people should be mindful of where their cats are and "what" theyÂre doing! In that first long post of years ago I told the story of the (feral, or once tame?) Cat who was living in my backyard at the last house! IÂve always fed the birds, and this cat had made my yard his own private diner! I put boards in the window wells to keep him from sleeping there, and shoved some wood under a juniper he was sleeping under, trying to get it to go away. At the time I was commuting to San Fran, and was usually gone for 5 or 6 days at a time. One time, in winter, I got back home and found the kitty dead, and frozen stiff, in a perennial bed under one of my main bird feeders. The point I was trying to make, to all the people in that post who thought their cats had a right to be and were enjoying their life outdoors on their own, was that that cat had a terrible life! It appeared to have been tame at some point, so somebody probably left it out and it just disappeared and tried to survive on its own. If the "owners" had truly cared about it, they would have kept it inside where it was safe and fed and taken care of. Leaving cats roam outside is NOT a kind thing to do. In my opinion, people who donÂt want to have a cat in their house shouldnÂt have a cat! And IÂm going to end this post the way Bonnie started hers! I am not a cat hater! IÂm more of a dog person than a cat person, but I love all animals. When I was a PaulinoÂs, we adopted and tamed two feral kitties. I was god-mother to the first one, and mother to the second one. Actually, the second one appeared to have also been a pet, and very easily tamed to us compared to the first one which was truly a feral. As soon as they were tame enough to do so, they were taken to a vet and spayed. And, yes, they were allowed to roam outside, but they had 25 acres to do their roaming on! It was more of a "farm" situation, where I believe cats that are cared for are ok outside. And while they did occasionally go outside, they almost always just stayed in the greenhouses. So itÂs not the cats IÂm against! Like Bonnie, itÂs the irresponsible owners that I have a problem with! Lover of animalsÂbut not always a lover of humans, Skbyird

NHBabs: I see the ants swarming regularly, probably every few months, and always in the bluestone path. When I've pulled up the pavers to regrade I've seen extensive tunnels so there's a thriving colony or colonies under there. Mostly I just try not to step on them - the swarms don't last for long aboveground and don't affect me in any unpleasant way. What’s with the ant swarms in sidewalk cracks in summer? Claire

Thanks for all the advice! Pergola sounds like heaven! Maybe in a couple of years, something to plan for. There are no plant shelves, but I did notice some sides are not completely straight down so I need to mess around with that a bit and see if I can improve on that. The barred owls are my biggest concern. The last one cleaned out my entire pond in the winter, when fish were sluggish and there wasn't enough depth. I was wondering what was coming to the pond as I watched the numbers dwindling...one night I look out of my sunroom window and perched on a japanese maple next to the pond, these big eyes look back at me and flies away...an owl! Never even knew they could fish! I bought a dome shaped netting from Foster and Smith and although it is not big enough for the entire pond, if I can figure out how to get it up and over the pond, it will help protect a large portion of it. I appreciate all your tips!