Boomer and his catnip

[momo]

My cat Boomer loves his catnip, he loves it to death usually. So I came up with a plan to plant catnip all around the garden, hoping that one plant might escape his notice long enough to become well established. Well, it finally worked and now Boomer is amusing us all with his strange behavior, he babies the ‘good’ catnip plant while killing the others.

This is Boomer’s ‘pet’ catnip, I planted it in the fall.


This is a plant that has survived almost a year.


Here he is, rolling on it.


He quickly noticed this catnip that I planted recently.


Aren't pets fun?

[The Helpful Gardener]

I don't plant Nepeta cataria in my yard as we have so many wild cats, but my guys seem to make do with N. faasinii 'Walkers Low' and N. x 'Kit Kat'. The Walkers Low needs cutting at least once midseason but 'Kit Kat' is a well behaved little kitten and plays cutely along the front of the border, I put the Walkers on the side of the house with a couple out by the road for the strays (keeps them out of the yard some)

Cats don't tear the other species up quite as much as N. cataria, so you can actually keep garden plants, but crush it up fresh and they are PLENTY interested in the garden varieties...

HG

[hendi_alex]

I really enjoy wild birds and incorporating plantings in the yard to make it more bird friendly and friendly to other wild animals that range the yard. Problem is, that effort and the presence of cats are pretty much mutually exclusive. So am patiently waiting on our two rescue cats to die off and will dare the wife to bring home any more of those 'cuties'.
Death machines is what they are, killing anything that moves, and just for the pure pleasure of it. Who says that humans are the only ones to kill just for the killing? Of course Slim, our second best cat ever, is in his killing prime and is ever so lethal. Yet I have to love the black cat that follows us around the yard like a dog, and craving affection, is not aloof like so many cats. Our other cat is the manifestation of pure disdain. It only takes a look to put us in our lowly human place. She is now old and fat, not too much threat to the wild yard critters.

Slim appears to be part Siamese.



K.C. during an uncharacteristic good mood.

[The Helpful Gardener]

Slim is practically a double for our Lily; she's younger and smaller, but we thought perhaps an oriental mix too. Now I'm not so sure; perhaps black cats of that type have a little genetic thing all their own going on...

Lily is showing signs of being a predator of some stature and I am fighting millions of years of evolution to try and get her to stop hunting birds, I claim some success in that I have introduced a few hundedths of a second of hesitation already, but she just seems to be getting faster, so I don't know...we all choose how much footprint we take up, and I think of having outdoor cats as a bigger footprint. You called it Alex, they are killing machines and have huge impacts on local ecosystems. Just look at Australia's issues today with cats.

I feel I have replaced an apical predator as we have run many of the apical predators out of our local environs (seen a bobcat lately?), probably not the greatest exchange, but in the grand scheme, man is just another species and our behaviors are natural too, like keeping pets (many species have done very nicely cozying up to man; some we like and some we don't). I try to go outside with my cats as much as possible, and mitigate their contact with wild biota, but the neighborhood I live in is already pretty well changed by the presence of Man for 300 years, and my kittens are a pretty insignificant part of that...

HG

[hendi_alex]

We are pretty rural on 130 acres of undeveloped land and the bob cats, foxes, and more recently the coyote are fairly common. The coyote is of course the most adaptable of the three and is increasing at an alarming rate. When my girls were small, probably 16-18 years ago, we would camp in a platform treehouse. You never hearch such a fit as when the bob cat would roam close by, kind of reminiscent the tasmanian devil as portrayed on the cartoon. Now on a typical evening we hear the somewhat scarry sound of a group of coyotes. That is a pretty spooky sound also.