Thread: Anyone cat proofed their garden??

Originally Posted by Howlinbob

Hi Catlover, we enclosed our garden DIY using plastic netting and metal garden poles. It's a small L-shaped garden which wraps around the corner of our house, and previous owners planted fir trees around the perimeter for privacy. We used these to our advantage when it came to the netting. Our garden wall is topped by those horrible 1970's pre-formed concrete decorative blocks, so we used those as well. We attached the 6 ft poles to the wall using cable ties (through the gaps in the decorative wall). Then we cut sheets of netting to size and attached that to the poles, and to the trees, using smaller cable ties. At about 8ft high we attached more netting on the horizontal, using the tree branches, to create a canopy, to stop the cats from climbing to the tops of the trees and escaping that way. There is only one entrance to the garden, via a gate, so we made a screen out of netting and tree branches (I was in the Girl Guides!) to extend the gate so that they can't jump over it. The netting was about £1 a metre from Homebase, and I forget how much the poles were. We used hundreds of cable ties, but even so the whole job came to about £60. The cats don't climb the netting, as it is too flimsy to hold their weight, in fact they don't like getting their claws caught in it. Besides, there are plenty of trees for them to climb, and we made a couple of tree platforms for them, so they've got somewhere to climb to, and hang out.

We had one escape early on, when we missed a bit at the bottom of the trellis, and Larry appeared on the other side of the wall. And again when it was very snowy in December, Monty was sitting on the wall when I realised he was on the other side of the netting! But he wasn't running off down the road, he was just sitting there going 'ermmm, help! how do I get back?' In fact, he hadn't gone anywhere as there were no paw prints in the snow. So I nipped out of the gate and rescued him. He' had managed to squeeze his snakey body through a small gap, so some string and more cable ties sorted that out.

The netting is quite fine so it's not noticeable at all from a distance, and when the garden starts growing again in a few weeks' time, it will be even better. When the weather warms up we have plans for more tree platforms, ladders, and fun stuff for the men!

Just having another think about how we're going to go about catproofing the garden and found your thread with pics of your garden- looks brilliant and I bet the cats appreciate it. I think your approach might work well for our garden...... I think a trip to homebase is in order! Exciting!!

Did you have any places where the garden poles needed to be placed directly in the ground? And if so, how far in did you put them and how did you stabilise them? We've got 2 hedges on 2 sides and a mishmash of hedge and fences on the 3rd side.