I love my plants and I love my cats.  Both cats are great gardeners, supervising the planting, pruning and tending during the growing season and the watering and repotting activities during the winter.  Unlike some other pets of my acquaintance, they do not eat plants, which is a great help--to me and to them.  They do have a fondness for dirt, however, and the instinct to dig.  That's where we sometimes come into conflict.

I have a large lemon tree in a pot that is nearly thirty inches across.  Several years ago I noticed that every morning the dirt in the pot was disturbed, with holes in the surface of the soil and clods of dirt all over the floor.  The lemon tree itself was fine, but the pot was a mess.  This was not a case where the cats used the pot as a litter box; clearly they were just having a little fun.

I don't really need to spend time each day shoveling dirt back into plant pots and wiping up the floor, so I decided to find a solution that would save the soil without hurting the cats.  I took a large container of beach glass that my daughter had collected during our summer vacation and spread the contents over the soil surface so that it was completely covered.  The effect of this glass mulch was very pretty and I hoped that it would act as a cat deterrent.  The next morning when I came into the dining room I found that there were no telltale dirt clumps on the floor.  In subsequent days the cats gave me what I thought were annoyed glances, but the floor around the plant pots remained clean.   I was afraid that they might turn their attentions to some of the smaller pots, so I added beach glass to those as well.  When I ran out of my daughter's supply I bought some additional man made beach glass at the craft store.  Now I keep some on hand for newly acquired plants as well.

I am lucky.  The time that I save not cleaning up dirt around the plant pots I can spend cleaning up the shreds of toilet paper from the bathroom floor.  Bored felines are endlessly ingenious.