Benefits from Inviting Pets in Your Garden
By melissagreen
19 comments
You know just how unruly a pet can get. Their wild nature is both a menace and a delight to your everyday life. They colour the house like nothing else, sometimes literally if you leave any colouring items unattended, but mostly by bringing joy to you and your family with their furry (or feathery) being. But what do they bring to the exterior of the home, or, in other words, the garden? Many home owners are actually quite the gardeners who spend a lot of their time landscaping, and a significant number of them keep the pets away from the garden for no other reason than fear of what the pet might do to their creations. Reliable gardening is very hard to manage when you have a wild pet roaming about, after all. But then, are there any benefits from letting the pet run wild among your plants?
Let’s clear the negative sides first. Obstreperous pets can be very damaging to plants, they can bite off leaves, they can strike down stems, they can dig out roots. If a dog thinks that there is something curious hidden under the area of planting, it will dedicate most of its afternoon into digging it out. Dogs especially love digging, and therefore might plant a few bones or other items that could damage the growth of the garden. Cats, on the other hand, might be very lazy to do all this, but if they feel naughty and you have some very colourful plants, they might feel like swatting at it a few times.
Plants can also be harmful to your pets. Some pets have the habit of taking a bite from a plant and the ingestion of certain plants is very poisonous to them. Respiratory and bowel problems, vomiting, inner imbalances, these are only a few things that could happen to a pet if it risks checking whether a plant is edible.
But then you have some positives as well. The most obvious is being that animal faeces are a natural fertilizer for gardens, especially the cat’s as the felines have the habit of digging it in the soil. Even if they don’t do it in the landscaped areas and where the flowers are, you can still find some and add it to a compost heap to make your very own fertilizer. The dog’s natural instinct to dig things in the ground can also benefit you if it does it to organic items like food waste. All the bones it digs into the ground also work as fertilizers as they spread the food waste’s nutrients to all the roots.
Many times the pets don’t do anything to the plants but simply huddle next to them because of the shade the leaves provide, or the moist-retention the soil around them has (if you practiced palpable gardening skills, of course). This will keep the plants warm in colder days and there will be less dead leaves to prune at a later point. The more they help by minimizing the trimming and hedging you have to do, the better. And if you have a feathery friend, like a chick or a duckling, it could take care of the weed control in your stead, plucking out all the problematic grasses and actually helping the plants grow. And don’t worry about a fowl attacking a flower, that is an occurrence of mythical frequency.
As you can see, there are two sides to everything. While pets can be very problematic in the garden and could be an issue to deal with when gardening, they can also have some positive effects on taking care of your garden. You decide whether your pet is the type that won’t get itself into trouble when in is the garden or harm the plants you dedicated so much time on, and if it is the more peaceful sort, just let it be. It can only help the plants there.
24 Feb, 2016
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Comments
Hello, Loosestrife2! Thank you for your comment. I am always happy to learn something new. I will definitely take a note on what you have said. I will consider it for my future articles. I should tell that I also prefer to see only beautiful and blooming flowers in the morning :)
25 Feb, 2016
You are very welcome and WELCOME TO GOY!
25 Feb, 2016
Welcome to GOY. I also have an issue with pets, usually cats, who use my garden as a toilet. I've tried so many products to deter them, I even used netting but they left their deposits all over the netting which made it even more horrible to clean up. The cats who come into my garden seldom seem to cover up their poo, leaving it in smelly piles for me to find. Sometimes I end up with it all over my hands when I've been weeding. Another problem I have is that I've found cats curling up to sleep on my smaller plants and flattening them, they also kill birds and mice and leave their half eaten remains for me to find. Cats are very definitely not welcome in my garden! Dogs are not allowed in, because in the past boisterous dogs have got in and galloped all over the garden damaging some plants beyond repair.
25 Feb, 2016
Just a little defence of cats to balance things!
A good way to keep cats out of your garden can be to own one, preferably a personable male so you don't attract toms. Ours happily doesn't dig in the beds or leave unwelcome heaps, and strange cats who pass though do just pass through.
And she has caught all our moles and three young rats. In 40 years of cat ownership I can remember hardly any damage done by ours. The only thing she has ever swiped at is a clump of ornamental grass which she loves to dive at and grab, but it comes up smiling ready for next time. There is much to be said on both sides.
The only thing she has ever swiped at is a clump of ornamental grass which she loves to dive at and grab, but it springs back every time.
Dogs can do a lot more damage more quickly.
Interestingly it is normally the top cat of the neighbourhood who doesn't bury its waste, leaving "I'm in charge" messages for any others.
25 Feb, 2016
I love my garden and my pets, always have done, they are company for us and are trained to share the garden and know if they go on the beds and borders then they are in trouble, I do have a dogrun but that's for when its too soggy for even me to walk on let alone my dogs, they never would be shut out completely, no point in having them if that was the case, the cats I've trained to go in a certain place, not everywhere, I am lucky in a sense as my garden is the only one that is not all grass so I know that although they will go in my neighbours gardens they do come home if they need the loo as naturally they do prefer a bit of earth, I was going to say not put the faeces in the compost but L'strife has covered that part..
Louisa I think you would deter them by a sharp squirt from the hose or even treat yourself to a childs water pistol, as a cat owner I know that would work a lot better than any amount of rubbish that is sold these days, most are expensive and rarely work....
25 Feb, 2016
Thanks for the advice Lincslass, but the problem is that they steer well clear of the garden if they see me, they only come and do their damage when I'm not there! All the local cats are afraid of me and flee as soon as they see me!
26 Feb, 2016
There are several cats living around here. They are all welcome in my garden. They make me feel at ease. I have a little chat with them as they pass through :) I've never known any of them to leave their mess here. Like my own cats, they go to the toilet in the hedgerows.
And they've never damaged any plants. The only plant damaged by one of my cats was a cactus - she used to snap the spines with her teeth ... but the cactus didn't harm the cat. She lived to be 22 yrs old.
There are also dogs around here but they are never allowed out of their 'own' gardens. One from nearby escaped once and found her way into my garden. She just waited for me to fetch her owner to take her home. She didn't damage anything because her owner loves the garden and she's probably used to plants.
The only animals I don't want in my garden are birds. I hate them and they can keep away.
None of the cats I've ever had catch birds. One of them caught a bird once and that's the only one I know of. They catch mice in the hedgerows.
27 Feb, 2016
Interesting Hywel. Any particular reason for the dislike of birds?
27 Feb, 2016
They are ugly and they make my skin crawl. I hate them :(
27 Feb, 2016
Hywel, strange that you feel that birds are ugly, maybe something happened at some point to make you not like them? I find birds very beautiful, and many of them are highly intelligent. There's a crow living next to the offices I work at who 'knows' me among the 700 other people who work here. I'm certain he recognises my car (there are 600+ in the car park) He'll fly right in front of my face to let me know he's there and he wants feeding and he'll follow my car as he knows I have food for him. I'm very fond of him.
You are lucky that your local cats go to the toilet in the hedgerows. We don't have hedgerows where I live but I'm just about the only gardener around. Everyone else has paved over their garden and park their cars there. That's why all the cats come to my garden to do their 'business'.
2 Mar, 2016
Have plenty of food for the crow Louisa. In the wild, they live to be twenty years old on average. They do recognize facial features so it is very apt to pick you, it's friend, out of a crowd anytime......also they are extremely intellegent as you know. As for myself, I fear horses...but I never was afraid to place a bet on one:)
2 Mar, 2016
It's a phobia Louisa. I don't when or how it started. All I know is that I never want to look at or be near a bird.
2 Mar, 2016
I can tell you exactly when my fear of horses started. As a youngster a read an article in a local newspaper of how a girl went up to a horse to pet it and it bit her nose completely off her face. Ever since that time I won't go near a horse.
3 Mar, 2016
Louisa be careful when attracting birds to you like that, where I worked was on the edge of our towns recreation ground and the other side was a public carpark, a couple of years before I retired , there was a bird there living in the trees that started attacking people for food, it used to dive at peoples heads, it attacked little children in the rec and even babies in their pushchairs if it spotted anything it thought was food, it was horrifying to see it attacking people and babies, it didn't only happen at nesting time either so it wasn't a case of feeding chicks....
3 Mar, 2016
Thanks for the concern, I've been doing this for several years now and I'm not doing it in a 'public' place. I feed them at the edge of the company car park, where there are woods, there are no children anywhere near and the birds are only interested in me.
4 Mar, 2016
The crow family are all very intelligent. I think its more usually gulls who attack people for food. You are lucky to lL BE A REASOBABLE WINNER...have a bird friend Louisa - I enjoyed imagining the pair of you!
4 Mar, 2016
Thanks Steragram, I enjoy my 'friendship' with my crow. He even knows I finish work an hour earlier on a Friday. How does he know it's Friday??
4 Mar, 2016
Good grief!!! (Can't imagine where those words in caps came from- very strange!)
4 Mar, 2016
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I'm from the USA, and contrary to our Declaration of Indepenence (All Men Are Created Equal), I say that "All poop are NOT created equal." Dog and cat poop are high in protein from the meat in their food and are highly acidic and very detrimental to the garden their urine included. Also they contain harmful bacteria and possibly parasites of the same ilk. In addition this type of "fertilizer" as you call it is not layed down periodically but every day several times a day causing rapid accumulation of odorous filth. I always pick up after my dogs on my property and off, I have three of them and expect my neighbors to do the same to these lumps of fly breeders and attractors. On a warm spring morning I prefer my nose to catch the beautiful scent of honeysuckle and nothing otherwise. Finally, properly trained pets are not unruly and certainly not a menace. Otherwise, I will not take issue with anything else you have said:)
25 Feb, 2016