It is very hard to keep cats out of your garden, but do not give up, it can be managed. Cat owners may not understand why gardeners want to stop cats gaining access to their gardens, but there are valid reasons, it is not always that gardeners hate cats. Cats are ferocious hunters and can also be very destructive.

For example, my next door neighbour had a cat, but became lonely when her daughter moved away, so she allowed the cat to breed. Now she has six cats. But cats are not like dogs. My dog stays in my garden not upsetting anyone except by barking if a stranger walks past the house However, that is his job and he is not only telling me but the neighbours too. These six cats do not stay in their own garden though, so we have all acquired six cats whether we want them or not.

The first problem I became aware of was that birds stopped coming to pick my dog’s bowl clean in the afternoon. Then I saw a cat eating a lizard, a beautiful nine inch specimen and then I remembered not seeing a lot of lizards lately. There is one lizard, the Tokay, that they have completely wiped out – I used to listen to them calling at night, but no more.

Cats also dig up plants when they defecate and use furniture as scratching boards, so I do not want these destructive animals in my garden. But how do you keep cats out of your garden?

Walls are rarely protection against cats, but cats will often prowl along the bottom of walls and if they come across a gap, they will possibly go in out of inquisitiveness, so repair all low-level gaps in your fences. There is not much you can do about the top of your wall other than putting broken glass or electrified wiring up there, but that is not a good idea.

Some dogs are good at keeping cats away, but not all. My dog got a nasty and totally unexpected swipe of claws across his nose one day. He used to chase them when they were kittens, but now they have grown up, he only growls to tell me a cat is on the property. I cannot blame him.

In Australia, many gardeners reckon that transparent bottles full of water confuse cats, so they stay away, but in my experience, only Australian cats behave in that manner.

A row of thorny bushes or flowers along the base of a wall where cats regularly come in works. At the base of high walls too, where the cat cannot see them until he is on top of the wall. I often see cats mewing (in frustration, I hope) on the top of one of my walls. The only way down is to go back.

If you still cannot keep cats out, then you will have to train them not to come in. This is easiest achieved by using several methods. If cats are using your flower pots are toilets, try smearing the pots with pepper, lavender, lemon, mustard, or tobacco. Or you could leave a mothball in each pot. Some of these will work for you, others will not.

Then there are industrial repellents, but I do not want to resort to them. However, if you have a big garden and a big problem, it might be the only way. There are also high frequency sound emitters. Humans cannot hear them, but almost all animals can, so I think that that is deplorable as well.

At night, motion-activated exterior lighting is a great upset to cats. Cats have extremely sensitive night vision so a quick flash from a floodlamp really puts them off a garden.

The best disincentive is water. You can get motion-activated sprinklers, which are brilliant at keeping cats out of your garden, but I like to sit in my office or in the garden with a powerful water pistol and squirt them by hand. The lizards have not come back yet, but nor do the cats quite so frequently either.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of topics, but is at present involved with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

Many people like the notion of having a pool in their backyard. If you do too, you must understand that it takes either a lot of work or a lot of money to set up. Then there is the incessant maintenance of the pool and its water. If you are concerned that you will lose all of your garden, there is no need, because you can design your pool so that there is a fair bit of greenery built into it. In fact, there are many suggestions you can use when landscaping for a pool.

When landscaping for a pool, you need to have a design to work to. You can either have a tailor-made plan drawn up for your backyard, you could make your own plan or you could use one out of a magazine. There is no reason why you can not create your own design. The best way to begin would be to get some concepts from landscaping magazines or other household periodicals.

The best way of going about landscaping for a pool is to draw the exact size and shape of your backyard on a sheet of graph paper to scale. Plot in any immovable objects such as downpipes, a shed or septic tank. If that limits the size of your pool too much, you can have these items moved if need be. Nothing is without a solution, but it does add to the cost. Once you have adequate space, you are all set to start planning.

Copy and modify drawings from periodicals by all means, but if you feel that you are not up to it, have the drawing made for you. A local architect can do it, or phone the local technical college and ask one of the lecturers or students to do it for you. It is not as expensive as you might think. If you have the design done for you, make sure that you have thought about what you want and make sure that the drawer knows about it.

If you want lots of flowers, it is best to have raised flower beds. This will prevent your flowers from spreading too far and will allow you greater control. The plants will have to be quite hardy and resistant to chemicals such as chlorine. The atmosphere will be more humid around the pool too.

You will have to have some shaded area for when it is very hot. Trees are a good idea, but they can take a very long time to grow. Palms look fantastic by a pool, but some species can take five years to grow high enough. You could check out the possibilities of planting semi-mature trees or look for faster-growing varieties. In the meanwhile, you could set up a grass-roofed lean-to or some umbrellas.

Lighting is also an important consideration. The pool ought to be floodlit at night to prevent people falling into it at night; but not only for that reason, it looks good as well. Accent lighting on the plants and trees really brings atmosphere to the pool and these lamps can be solar powered so that you can move them around when you want to.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few subjects, but is now involved with outdoor accent lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

Every professional chef and every household cook recognizes the importance of fresh herbs to their culinary creations. No diner would dispute this either. However, whether you buy your herbs fresh or dried, there are problems. When you buy fresh, you usually have to buy more than you require and they are comparatively expensive, whereas, if you buy them dried, they could be old and dried herbs lose their strength over time.

Why then is it that most home cooks use fresh or dried herbs from the supermarket? Ease, probably. We lead busy lives and it is easier to get a few boxes of dried herbs at the supermarket along with your groceries than it is to grow your own.

Not that it is difficult to raise your own herbs and even spices, but you have to purchase the seeds, plant them and remember to water them. You can minimize the problem of trying to remember to water them quite easily, by growing your herbs in a window box or in trays on your patio or deck, so that you see them every time you take a break on your patio. You will also remember to bring them in if frost looks likely.

If you have children, growing herbs and spices in window boxes or trays can be a good introduction to gardening for them. Herbs take very little looking after really, just requiring watering every day. They are pretty tough and fertilizer is not essential as most herbs have a fairly short life. Maybe only a month or two in some cases. Others last a lot longer.

First decide how many varieties you want to cultivate. How much room do you have for example? The best way to start is look in your cupboard and see which herbs you use most frequently. Are any of them seeds? You could have a go at planting these. Look them up in a book or on the Internet.

Sometimes it is better to soak the seeds first before sowing them, others do not need this treatment. Second, which herbs have you heard about that you would like to use but never seem to have in the house? Try planting those too.

If all that does not sound like fun, then you can buy small herb plants in the garden nurseries. Most of them stock the most common herbs in Spring. Whichever way you go, read up on how to cultivate the herbs you have selected. I promise you, it will not be a long read, as they really do take care of themselves except for the watering. if you buy seeds rather than seedlings, all the details you need will be on the seed packet and such packets are very cheap to buy.

The advantages of having your own herb garden are manifold, but you will be teaching gardening to your kids or grandkids, you will have fresh herbs for cooking and you will have gorgeous aromas wafting around your patio or deck.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with outdoor heat lamp. If you are interested in patio heaters too, please click through to Residential Patio Heaters.

Have you ever wanted a wild flower garden? A wild flower garden is not just a garden that has turned wild, in fact it is quite the opposite. A garden that has gone wild usually looks a bit of a mess, whereas a wild flower has to have a closely controlled environment.

Garden flowers have been hardened, so to speak. They have been cultivated and cross-bred so that they can put up with not being taken care of all that well by the typical gardener who does not know much about gardening, although there are some very fragile garden plants too. However, wild flowers have never had this treatment, they grow only where the circumstances are right or they do not grow at all. It is practically impossible to grow wild flowers where they would not naturally grow.

This is why many people’s attempts at making a wild flower garden flop so miserably – they have expected the wild flowers to ‘just grow wild’ without having made the right environment. Therefore, if you decide to create a wild flower garden, you will first have to determine what kind of flowers you want to grow.

Do you fancy meadow flowers, woodland flowers, hedgerow flowers, marsh or riverside flowers? You can amalgamate some of these styles, of course. You could merge meadow and hedgerow varieties, if you plant a hedge border around your garden.

After you have decided on which varieties of flowers you want to or can grow, you need to set about manufacturing the correct environment. One of the prettiest wild flower gardens, if your climate is right, is an orchid garden. In Thailand, a lot of the orchids grow on the bark of live or fallen trees, so we have a few uprooted tree stumps in shaded areas of the garden with dozens of wild orchids growing on them.

The simplest wild flower garden for most people to create would be waterside, meadow and hedgerow combined. Therefore, first you will have to create a suitable pond and start growing wild hedges around your perimeters. Then plant a coarse grass on the rest of the soil. The pond can have a brick border, but at least one edge should be muddy – just wet mud leading into a shallow edge of the pond.

When these micro environments are ready, but not before, you can go out and forage for plants from like environments to transplant into your wild flower garden. One note of caution here: please ensure that the flowers that you want to gather are not protected before you uproot them and never denude an area of a species. If there are only one or two plants of a type, do not take them.

Remember that your wild flowers are not that resilient, so you ought to have prepared their new home before you went collecting and you must replant them as soon as you get back. Try not to leave it until the next day.

It is preferable to collect flowers just after they have flowered and are commencing to die back. When you have discovered a flower that you want, carefully dig it up with a trowel and incorporate a good sized slab of soil with its roots. You can put this into a plastic bag and place this in a basket. It is a good suggestion to take few photos of the flower in its original surroundings, so that you can do a bit of tweaking when you get home. It will also help you remember what that flower likes to live with when you go out foraging for your wild flower garden next time

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of topics, but is at present concerned with exterior wall lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

If you are a keen gardener, then you perhaps would like or already have a greenhouse. A greenhouse allows a gardener to indulge in gardening all year round, but did you know that the design of the greenhouse is very important? Greenhouse designs vary according to what they are to be used for and to some extent where the garden is situated. Therefore, when it comes to greenhouse designs, choosing the best for your garden is quite important.

If you get the right greenhouse for your purpose and use it as it should be, your greenhouse will pay for itself over and over again, but not only that, it will repay for its carbon footprint by propagating more flowers which will in turn help keep the ecosystem in balance. Not to mention keeping the gardener happy. Everybody is a winner with a greenhouse.

Greenhouses are not cheap and one often wonders why. There just does not seem to be much to them to make them so expensive. For this reason, it is vital that you get the best of greenhouse designs for what you want to cultivate.

You will also have to take size into account: the amount of space that you can allow for your new greenhouse and how many plants you want to produce in it.

After you have thought about the overall size that you would like, the next deliberation is the basic structure. Do you want it attached to your house like a lean-to or do you want it to be free-standing?

Free-standing greenhouse designs are more expensive but they are also the more flexible of the two greenhouse designs. They are more expensive because you will have to have four walls not three and you will have to run water and electric services to it.

Free-standing greenhouse designs are more flexible and therefore offer greater proceeds because you can locate them wherever you like to gain the most light from the sun. Normally, this means having the longest side to the south in the northern hemisphere.

Attached greenhouse designs have the wall of the house or garage as one wall of the greenhouse. Which wall of the greenhouse that is, is up to you of course, but if you can utilize one of the gable ends, the short side, so much the better.

Try to have one of the longest walls facing the sun for most of the day. Again, you will need to run water and electricity into it, but this does not usually mean burying the cable and pipe underground or armouring the cable, which works out less expensive.

Once you have made your choice from the several greenhouse designs, you can decide which plants you would like to grow in it. You can literally grow anything you want, if you create the right ecosystem for it. So, if you want to have as much flexibility as possible invest in a decent lighting system.

Get the best and most adaptable you can afford. Look for ones that will supply a broad range spectrum ‘grow light’, so that your plants will not suffer in the winter and get normal tube lighting for yourself for when you need to see better.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

The primary priority of any koi pond keeper, indeed of any fish pond keeper, it to preserve the pond water at a high level of hygiene. This basically means that you have to keep the nitrate and ammonia levels down. However, the fish will not help in this endeavour, and nor can they, since they live and defecate in their surroundings, the water. You could rightly say that the live in their own toilet bowl.

Therefore, it is up to you, as their patron, to keep their water as clean as possible. This is actually not so difficult and much or the cleansing process can be automated, leaving you, the owner, to only have to carry out routine, weekly checks.

The first check that you should carry out can be made on a daily basis if not more frequently, when you feed your fish, does the water look clear? Is it green? Are there lots of leaves floating around in it? If it is translucent enough to see the bottom of the pond, you are probably doing OK, but do not rely on that, wait for the weekly chemical check up.

Never forget that you have manufactured an unnatural environment for your fish to live in. It is closer to nature that a fish tank, but it is a long way from being a river or a lake. This is why the bigger your pond is, the easier it will be to maintain, because the closer it will be to the real thing.

The smaller your pond, the more that you will have to depend on water filtration and oxygenation systems to keep the water crystal clear. One way of helping to maintain clear water is not to over feed. Most fish pond owners give far more fish food that the fish require.

This results in more faeces and more rotting food on the bottom of the pond. All this excess energy in the water is happily used up by algae, which will also draw the oxygen out of the water as it blooms. If you find yourself in this position, the first thing to do is reduce the amount of feed and clean the sides of the pond of algae. If you do not, the shortage of oxygen will stress out your fish and stressed fish are more susceptible to disease.

Keep the water in your pond circulating as much as you can, as this will reintroduce oxygen into the water that the fish, algae and plants have removed. The typical methods of doing this are to have a fountain, a waterfall and an oxygenator (or bubbler, like you see in fish tanks).

Another way of dealing with oxygen and algae issues is to not overstock your fish pond. Koi will breed readily, so if you just start your population off with a few fish, you will soon have many more. They know when there are too many of them and they will eat the young or control the breeding in other ways. If you do all you can to give your fish a good milieu, they will do the rest.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with fish pond accessories. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for some great deals.

A backyard fish pond will augment the beauty of your garden, there is no question about that. A backyard fish pond will add a focal point to a scruffy garden and will make a lovely backyard or garden even more interesting. There is something happy about the gurgling and splashing of fresh water.

However, despite the massive upside of having a backyard fish pond, there is also the question of maintenance. This is not an onerous task, but it is on-going and does need to be carried out on a methodical basis.

Everybody enjoys a backyard fish pond. If you already have one, you can bear witness to the fact that guests, friends and family like to spend time sitting around the edge of your pond watching the fish go about their lazy lifestyles and listening to the rhythm or running and splashing water. It seems to fascinate humans and it is soothing.

If you do not already own a pond, but want one, the first step is to choose where to locate it. A few suggestions here:

1] do not site it at a low point in the garden otherwise it might flood when it rains and your fish might swim away. 2] try not to put it under a tree or you will spend the rest of your life dredging foliage out of the water 3] do try to put your backyard fish pond where it will be at least in partial shade at midday

Once you have the prime site, you have to think about size and format. The most popular formats are: round, square, oval and kidney shaped. The depth of the water is also important if you live in an area that is subject to freezing. Thirty to forty-five inches is enough in most instances, but it would be worth asking neighbours or the local pet shop for guidance.

Once your pond is in place, you can install your apparatus. You will have to have a pump to suck the debris out of the water and forward it to the pond filter. However, this pump will allow plant debris to pass through it, so if you want a fountain, you will almost certainly need another pump, otherwise the fountain’s jets will become blocked by dead vegetation.

If this all seems a bit much, you can buy a pond kit which contains all the bits and pieces you will need to set up a backyard fish pond. One tip here: if you get solar-powered equipment, it will save on electrician’s fees and you will never have an electricity bill for your backyard fish pond.

After installing the pumps, filter and fountain, you can fill the pond up with water and turn the equipment on. The water is unsuitable for fish at the moment, so just allow the equipment run in and the water mature. This will take a week for the water. Meanwhile, pick your fish and plants and construct any hidey-holes you want to put in for your fish.

When the week is up, you can add your plants and populate your backyard fish pond with fish.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with koi pond kits. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a special deal.

We all realize that stress kills in the human world, but did you realize that stress kills in the animal kingdom as well? It should not really come as much of a surprise an humans are only intelligent animals anyway. Stress kills animals, including fish as certain as it kills us.

However, fish do not pay bills and most of them do not even care about their kids. Some fish even eat their own children, so why does stress build up in a fish?

Well, stress can build up in a fish for many reasons, but the main one is bad environment, which means water that contains a chemical imbalance or a lack of oxygen. Fish can also get stressed, if it does not have anywhere to hide from predators or the sun.

It is straightforward to give your fish somewhere to hide. You can grow plants in tubs or buy floating lilies and you can also create caves of a sort for the fish to go into. A chemical imbalance can be checked with a kit and rectified by following the instructions that came with that testing kit.

Algae can have a huge effect on the amount of oxygen in your pond’s water. During the day, the algae consumes carbon dioxide and produces oxygen – all well and good – but at night the reverse is true and a mass of algae can suck all the oxygen out of your pond water in no time at all.

So you have to regulate the amount of algae in your pond. And it is no good scraping it off the walls and hoping it will die, because rotting vegetation also consumes oxygen. Surplus algae has to be removed. A rule of thumb to check whether your pond water contains enough oxygen is to observe your fish. If they are continuously gulping air at the surface, then your pond water is oxygen deficient.

Warm water has less ability to hold water than cold water. Once water temperature reaches 80F or 25C, then you can be fairly sure that your pond water needs mechanical aeration. A fountain or a waterfall may not be enough, but it could be – it depends on the size of your pond, the number of plants, the number of fish, the surface area of the pond and the amount of algae.

It is not easy to work out the oxygen content of the water in your pond, but you can keep an eye on the general look of your pond and its contents. Algae is bad news, in general, do you have a lot of it? Are your plants, especially the lilies doing well? Are your fish gasping at the surface? Are they listless or active?

By looking at these indicators you should be able to get a good idea of what is happening in your pond. If you do not have a fountain, get one. Are things any better? If not, install a bubbler. Did that help? If not enough get a better filtration system and let the water run back into your pond via a waterfall. If that does not work, give up and try bee-keeping!

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is now concerned with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a great deal.

There are several types of gas lantern. They are chiefly used to produce light when you do not have a battery light or access to an electrical socket. In fact, they are most often used for emergency situations, when the power goes out at home, when you are camping or sitting in the garden later in the evening. They offer much more light than most torches and they are handy because you can stand them on a table, carry them, or hang them up.

There are quite a few models of gas lantern. However, they vary not only in design, but also in the type of fuel they burn. Some people like the old fashioned style kerosene or paraffin lanterns. They like the design, the historical aspect and possibly even the smell.

Their advantages are that the fuel is low-priced and easy to find. However, their disadvantages are that they smell and are very dangerous if tipped over. The storage of surplus paraffin or kerosene is also a grave risk, should a fire break out.

If you want one of these old design kerosene lanterns, they are widely available at camping, army surplus and hardware shops. If you are going to use them for emergency lighting, it is best to have four or five on hand, clean and ready to fill.

The wicks should be trimmed and the glass clean. Keep them in plastic bags to stop dust building up on them. Keep one already filled with kerosene so that you can fill the others by its light. It is safer and less wasteful this way.

However, the modern equivalent of the kerosene lantern is the propane gas lantern. Propane gas lanterns burn with a very clean flame, which is also quite hot, so it does warm up its immediate surroundings, possibly to a distance of a foot or two. Therefore, it can keep faces warm on a cool evening in the garden.

Propane gas lanterns are fueled by gas canisters. They come in various sizes from quite small to large, but the gas does burn for a long time. The small canisters are best for emergency use and the larger ones for use on camping trips or in the garden. They are relatively inexpensive, are clean to burn, provide some heat, are light weight and are very safe.

On the safety side of things, it is clearly very important that you follow the manufacturer’s directions when using any kind of gas lantern, because they are all a latent fire hazard, especially when camping in a wood.

Become acquainted with the operation of the lantern you make your mind up to use before you have to use it. The gas lantern may get hot so be careful with it and get used to lighting it in the daylight so that you know what you are doing, when you need the gas lantern for real. One last suggestion, if you are taking a propane gas lantern on a camping holiday, take enough canisters with you. The merchant should be able to let know you how many hours they will last for the use you are going to put them to.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the propane outdoor heater. If you are interested in patio heaters too, please click through to Residential Patio Heaters.

If you reside in a temperate zone, fish from temperate zones can easily overwinter outside. On the other hand, tropical fish would die without a water heater. We will be looking at how you can keep cold water, temperate climate fish contented for the duration of a typical winter.

If you live in an area where winter is cold enough to produce ice, you will have to bear this in mind when you make your fish pond. How thick is ice normally in your area? In most cases, a ‘deep end’ of thirty to forty five inches should be ample, but you will have to get advice locally if you do not know the answer. A pet store, a neighbour or the zoo can offer the required advice.

The other problem with winter and ice is that a layer of ice prevents poisonous gases escaping and oxygen entering, as it would do in the usual course of events. Therefore, you will have to make certain that there is always a hole in the ice. However, smashing a hole will scare the fish.

There are several ways by which this air hole can be maintained under mild freezing conditions:

Aerator: a bubbler, can be positioned in the pond. It has to be submerged, obviously, and it has to be fairly vigorous, so that the bubbles keep breaking the ice above it. If it is put in water that is too shallow, it can freeze up too, so that is a consideration to be borne in mind.

De-icer: a mild, floating heater. This kind of device does not produce enough heat to threaten pond liners, but it is adequate to keep a small surface area ice free under most weather conditions.

Water pump: a pump pumping water at force through the surface can keep a breathing hole in your pond, but only under fairly mild icy conditions. The pump must be placed in deep water or it could freeze solid.

Hoola-Hoop: if the weather is only mildly icy, a hoola-hoop with a round football floating in its centre can be successful at stopping ice forming within the hoop. The wind keeps the ball moving within the hoop and ice does not get a chance to develop.

This hole in the ice is important. Your fish will be semi-dormant in the winter and you may not see them for months, but they still have to breathe and excrete and the gases that that and the plants give off have to be allowed to escape or they will poison the water and kill your fish.

At this time of the year it is extremely important not to over-feed. Fish build up layers of fat in the summer and live off that fat during their semi-hibernation in the winter, but they do eat occasionally. The only problem for you is that you will not know which days they decide to come up for a bite.

This is where the hoola-hoop can come in useful again. If you only feed within the hoola hoop, you can see how much food has been eaten and how much has been left. Aim to give no more than they will eat.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is now concerned with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a great deal.