Cat repellent?

I've been reading up on ways to keep all those stray cats from making gross toxic dump piles in my new garden. Lots of websites list smelly things they might not like.
Mothballs, which are actually as toxic as the poo, so no, I won't use that.
Cayenne pepper, okay, I have some left over from a yellow jacket nest project of about 4 yrs ago.
Lemon juice/peel, they don't grow on the trees up here, this would get kinda pricey, and have to be replaced on a regular basis, and I'm not sure it would work.
Ammonia. ??
Half filled water bottles; this sounds like a fly repellent from the southwest. I doubt if it would work on cats.

Okay so I was in a store, and found lemon scented ammonia, a huge bottle for a buck nineteen. I'm not sure what gives it the lemony scent, but ammonia is organic, breaks down readily into nitrogen which is actually like fertilizer, so how bad can it be? I squirted it around the perimeter of the garden yesterday, and it's been about 24 hrs., and no new piles! Yay! To me it's already a success, compared to two or three piles a day I've had to scoop out recently. I realize that after it rains again (tomorrow?) I'll have to repeat the application, but it's cheap, and only takes a couple minutes to go squirt around the edges out there, so it's definitely something that would be easy to maintain.

Knock on wood!

Traveling Minds

I just read an article in the Bellingham Herald, which quotes Shelley Muzzy: “Every minute feels like it’s really full and long. I’m really present; I’m not waiting to go somewhere or wishing I’m somewhere else. Every second I’m there I’m thinking I’m really lucky.”

This makes me think of how I feel living here, with my nice little house, garden, neighborhood, short walk to the bay, fresh air (except for the penta but that's another story), friendly people, good food... living alone and being able to learn to play guitar, cook up a nice dish, go hiking with friends, etc.

Her quote, though, starts with this: “I feel alive every minute when I’m traveling,” which changes the meaning quite a lot! I wonder how many other 'travel addicts' out there only feel that special way when they're away from home? It's all a mind shift, that feeling. If you live your life like you're on vacation, you can enjoy your life more, instead of spending most of your time waiting for the next trip outta town. Even on vacation you have to deal with clean clothes, or mending a lost button. How about appreciating what you already have, and being nice and friendly to other people on a regular basis, instead of only doing it when you're a guest in a foreign country? It might change the way others treat you too.

I'm all for traveling, and have done a lot of it myself. I think people really miss a lot if they never go somewhere far away. There's a lot to learn by it.

You can also learn how to catch the mindset of being there, when you're at home. It's a good way to truly appreciate your own home. To some people visiting here, this is a foreign country!

When you move to a new town...

You know when you're starting to settle into a new town, when you go to a public event and you see somebody you've met before.

You know you're really starting to settle into it, when you meet someone you've met before and you start up a conversation.

You know you've settled down, when you see someone at a public event, and ignore them so you won't get stuck in a conversation with them.

You know you've Really settled down when you go out of your way to avoid meeting up with someone that you really don't ever want to see again!

Gardening vs. Pregnancy

Today was good. Went hiking with two friends in Stimpson Nature Reserve during the rain, but it's so overgrown there that we hardly got rained on at all. Nice. Got home in mid-afternoon, and a friend had sent me a cd of our high school friend's music, that was fun to listen to.
Then around 4pm the sun came out! So I went outside, got my shovel and gloves, and worked a bit on the garden out front, trimming the overgrown grass away from the sidewalk. An old Chinese woman came by and without cracking a grin, totally poker face, said "It's not Spring yet!" I laughed and we talked for a bit, she gave me advice on getting down and pulling the grass out, I said I liked using my tools, but she's welcome to join in and start pulling if she wanted to!
Having that garden out front is sort of like being pregnant. Everyone thinks it's totally fine to just stop by, pat me on the proverbial belly, and tell me how I should do things. And it is totally fine, 'cause I'm not pregnant. But I remember how that was, and how total strangers would just out with it, blurt out whatever grand advice they held that they couldn't hold back. What's so fun about gardening is that it sure doesn't matter at all. They can say any old thing and it's so easy to either thank them, or humor them (if they're taking themselves a bit seriously) or pull their leg and tease them (if they're taking themselves way too seriously.) Most people who have gardened any time at all know that there's lots of ways to do it right, and what with the weather, seed types and qualities, etc... who knows! Almost anything goes. That's what's so fun about it. As long as you're getting some kind of good results some of the time, then it's a success. Meanwhile, we're all learning from each other, sometimes they really do have good ideas; sometimes they didn't know you can just "let it rot" and not till it in, and that works too. At least I hope so!

Garden Time

I'm reading a book about earthworms, and it's full of interesting information and entertaining anecdotes. I've been changing over my front lawn into veggie garden space, so it's a timely topic. New seed catalogs have arrived, and I'm planning now for the meals to come. (Breakfast today was roasted butternut squash and cornbread. Yea, I eat what I grow!)

I'm a fan of doing things the easy way if they work, so to change it over, I layered big sheets of cardboard over the lawn, then chunks of old hay bales, then horse manure and dozens of large bags of used coffee grounds from Starbucks. Not all at once, but over a period of many months. Most of it was free, and some was delivered for me. So it was not as much work as it sounds, and besides, it's good exercise.

Every now and then a neighbor will stop by and ask if I'm going to rototill it all in in the spring, and I say no, just going to plant in it, some of it veggies, some a cover crop to build up the soil.

In that earthworm book they mention how a lot of worms need a layer of decomposing leaves/plant material on top of the soil, so mine should be full of worms by next summer. Using a rototiller will kill most of the worms, and even 'double digging' can disturb them enough to interfere with their productivity.

(One other book I like is Ruth Stout's The No Work Garden Book. She's an advocate of very thick mulches and no digging.)

The two aspects of gardening that it helps to remember, is that 1: the health of the soil is everything, and 2: there's a delayed effect of sometimes a whole year. When I put something in/on the ground, it takes awhile for it to get into the system of the soil and then the plant, and show results. As the nutrients increase, the earthworms will reproduce and help the soil in many ways (aeration, fertility, etc.) It may take many years for it all to get into its prime.

Most of the plant lives underground. What you see is a small part of the whole plant, those roots spread far further and wider than the branches on top. And what you see, how green the leaves are, how many fruit and the nutritional content of it all, is a result of what's going on in the earth. Earthworms and all kinds of microbes, fungi, bacteria, and other teeny critters all contribute to the health of the plant, and secondly the health of those who eat the plant.

So in this book, they mention how "conventional" farming using petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides is not truly "conventional", it started relatively recently, in the post WWII era as a result of industry needing another use for their products, namely explosives (=fertilizers, think Oklahoma Federal Bldg. explosion) and nerve agents (=pesticides, very effective killers of living nerves of all kinds.) Marketing sure is effective, isn't it?...

Anyway, I haven't needed to add any worms out there, as there already were some under the lawn, but now they've already been working their way up through the now rotted cardboard, and are frolicking in the old manure and rotting straw, having a grand old time.

And so am I! (okay, I'm easily amused...)