Quite a lot of people aren’t keen on cats, especially when they prowl into your garden and start treating your carefully managed raised beds as a giant litter tray.
Indeed, cats can cause chaos in your garden – they rip up seedlings, attack birds, and leave unhygienic messes dotted around your flowerbeds. So if you’re not a cat person and you’re getting tired of finding clumps of cat poo in your vegetable patch, you’ve probably tried all sorts of methods to keep kittens et al at bay; everything from high-pitched ‘cat scarers’ to spraying cat repellent liquids.
But instead of cheap tat, there is a simpler, all-natural method gardeners have been using to keep cats out for decades – and you can just use what’s already in your kitchen.
Orange peel or lemon peel are an effective deterrent for cats, put simply, they just don’t like the stuff.
Simply buy an orange or a lemon as you normally would, but instead of adding the peel to your household compost, simply scatter them on your soil. Cats hate citrus peel, they can’t stand the smell, finding it overwhelmingly pungent and the smell warns them to stay away. It also works with other citrus fruits like lime, but oranges are probably the easiest option.
The other upside of orange peel is that it rots into the flowerbed and enriches the soil, so you’re not only getting a cat deterrent but helping the plants and flowers in the garden too (just watch you don’t make the soil too acidic if you do it too often).
Or you could distil orange essence into a spray bottle and spray it at various points in your garden. Re-applying orange zest or peel every few weeks should keep cats out on the cheap.
According to pet experts Catster, the reason cats hate orange so much is because of the oil within. The smell is apparently linked to potential danger for cats, and they will instinctively avoid citrus.
Vet Dr Paola Cuevas says: “Cats have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and they can detect scents farther away than we humans can. Most cats also detest the scent of citrus fruits, like oranges. Therefore, they tend to steer clear of such fruits. An unpeeled orange won’t bother your cat that much, but the oils in the orange peel are sure to turn a cat around and make them go in the opposite direction.
“The easiest and seemingly most effective way to deter cats with the help of orange peels is to simply gather a few peels and layer them in the soil around the plants, trees, and foliage that you don’t want any cats messing with.
“But you must do this regularly to keep cats away indefinitely. If you can not keep up with the process of adding and removing orange peels in your gardens, consider making an orange peel spray instead. You can then spray the leaves, stalks, stems, and trunks of trees, plants, and foliage that you want to deter cats from a few times a week.”
In terms of plants, cats don’t like lavender or some strong herbs like mint, but orange peel is probably the simplest and easiest option – and it works.