Those forking cats keep damaging my cucumbers

Also titled: “how to fork some cats.”

So I planted up my trellis bed with cucumbers a while back and they’re all doing well. A tad windburnt as you can see- but that’s fairly common damage and generally isn’t a major issue. Also some caterpillar damage but again, standard stuff.

However.

You see that coir cup? That was the spot where an entire cucumber plant bit the dust because something sliced through the stem. Sliced- not bit.

And the still alive but barely so cucumber plant in the background- also sliced not bit.

Diagnosis cats. (Now there’s an idea for a TV show…) The local ferals and outdoor felines were probably chasing voles over the bed- which I appreciate- and clawing up my plants in the process, which I do not appreciate.

What do we do to cats in the garden?

We fork them.

I had put one or two forks down when the plants were little, largely as a please-don’t-use-this-new-bed-as-a-litter box plea to the cat gods, and thankfully that seems to have largely worked.

But it clearly isn’t enough forks to deter a cat soaked in bloodlust from crashing and clawing their way through my cucumbers in pursuit of a rodent.

So there. Hopefully the sheer amount of forks will be enough to encourage the kittys to go around rather than through- and my surviving cucumber plants can live to grow tall.

Until the next problem!