The cheapest way to get rid of a cat is to do something to make it remember your yard as a no-go zone. In other words, scare the crao out of it. I had this orange cat stalking around in my yard, trying to catch my birds. One day I looked out, saw the cat in the bushes between my deck and the lawn, so I grabbed an air horn, and slowly sneaked up behind it, and blasted the air horn right behind hit. I've never seen a cat jump so high in my life, and it ran, and ran, and ran, and I've never seen it again. I guess I traumatized it! Joe

Lucky for me starlings are only an occasional problem in my yard. Hordes fly in, stay a week or so and vanish. When they come I use a recycled recycled plastic upside-down feeder like this: (from Suet Bird Feeders) I am loving the recycled plastic over wood, it's so easy to clean and you can even use bleach against mold. Don't think I haven't done a load of bird feeders in my dishwasher. BUT it's not perfectly starling proof - one starling will always figure it out. As an alternative I have a ground table feeder for starlings like this one: from Ground Table Bird Feeders. I use super cheap chicken feed cracked corn (was about $6 for a 50lb bag) and a super cheap millet/milo seed blend ($6 a 25lb bah) that I buy at a local feed store. The ground feeder is a lot easier for the starlings to use, plus they seem to prefer the corn food, so it at least keeps them busy and out of my other bird feeders to a great extent. They don't go through my pricey seed as fast. I've found offering starlings and grackle sort of birds alternative food works pretty well since they are going to be there no matter what I do. Jays also like the ground table.

black oil sunflower seeds probably attract more birds than any other feed. you can use a tube feeder or a mesh wire feeder or even a hopper feeder. Suet is a great treat in winter but some birds eat it year around. you can use a suet cage and buy suet cakes or make your own suet mix. there are lots of old posts on here making suet. if you like doves and juncos and other ground feeders the seed mixes with cracked corn ot millet do good but they also attract blackbirds and starlings and cowbirds which lots of people don't want around. the summer song birds such as tanagers and orioles and grosbeaks like fruit or berrys or drink from necter feeders. or plants with berrys or blooms and blossoms. the woodpeckers i get here love nuts and suet and cracked corn and millet. robins and bluebirds like mealworms or grubs or earthworms the tits and chickadees and nuthatches like suet or hulled sunflowers or boss or nuts.

Cutting wedges is a great technique. But sometimes you will have a root system that is lopsided, that is there are areas where there are no roots and some areas with all the major ones. So I would take my time to figure out any pattern and cut wedges accordingly. I ended up doing the same wedge technique to a guava. It had such a dense mat of roots (like hibiscus have) that is impossible to know where to begin. I ended up cutting three wedges with fresh soil. It was already in 511. But the new 511 was much more obviously porous. It filled it out pretty quickly and everything seemed like uniformly populated the next time I took it out and a hard time figuring where the previous wedges were located. It is hard to say whether one should bare root now. I would take it out of the pot and examine the roots carefully. And only do a full bare root if you see a problem like a clusters of dead roots. I also would use this opportunity to prune some of the bigger roots unless they are the only thing that you can find.