I'm sick of selfish neighbours and their cats

[sourglitterfrog]

We've lived in our house since last August, and the garden was a total state. Half the grass was either scorched yellow, dead or dug up by cats burying their scat.
I've done my best to revive it, spending lots of money aerating, scarifying and adding seed. It looks a lot better, considering we're on a budget and not able to afford a landscaper.
I've also spent a lot of money making a border, ready to plan fruit, veg and but the neighbourhood cats keep coming around and are continuing to be a nuisance.
I've got a PVC greenhouse, but I don't know what to do about planting stuff out when May comes. Chicken wire comes to mind, but my garden is going to look like Alcatraz, and I want the garden to be a safe space for birds and other wildlife, not to mention I don't want burnt yellow patches and turds in the garden, where my children play.
I've tried coffee grounds, sonar cat scarers, citrus peel to no avail.
I've spent upwards of £250 on cat deterrants and lawn repair this spring alone, to little avail.
Any advice would be gratefully received.
(If you're going to comment defending cats 'right to roam,' or similar snark, save it please. I don't dislike cats or their general nature. I just want safe solutions so I can have somewhat of a chance of a garden that isn't a communal cat toilet)

How many cats does your neighbour have? I’m really struggling to work out how a few cats are destroying your garden so badly. I live in a normal housing estate with neighbours both sides and at the back who keep cats and I don’t have any problems at all. They certainly don’t dig up my grass. They toilet in the flower beds but they bury it well so it doesn’t really bother me.
Are you absolutely positive it’s cats? Because it really really does not sound like normal cat behaviour. Cats don’t dig up grass

I have cats pooing in my front garden - it's quite annoying - they certainly don't bury it.
I've grown rosemary and lavender and put coffee grounds on the ground, and shue them away when I see them - but nothing really seems to completely work!

They don't dig up my grass though

Have you got a DH or adult son? Get them to pee around the perimeter of the garden. Cats are deterred by male urine.
Worked in my old house.

Umpteen cats. Not an exaggeration. There were bare patches already on the lawn when we moved in that cats were reusing as toilets, especially where our newly dug border is now. (It's definitely cat poo.) I watched one shite in a neighbours garden just this morning and bury it among their tulips.
To mitigate this, we've put netting/ scat mats and cocktail sticks in the border so the seeds we've planted aren't for nothing.
There are also cat logs every so often that aren't buried.
I'm also asking for advice so stop cats from coming into my garden to stop them burning the lawn with their pee. They also prey on the birds when they're eating from the feeders.
I want to plant cucumbers and tomatoes in the Summer, and I don't want my efforts to be for nothing. Flowers are one thing, but the food I feed my family are another.

Some cats do.

We couldn't work out what was pooing on our grass until we saw one on our CCTV.

That would be a funny (and troubling) sight, the three of them circling the perimeter 😅

The cats in our street use our lawn as a toilet. They crap all over it, no attempt to bury or anything.

OP, I feel your pain.

We have so many cats come into our garden and poo. I think they choose ours as all my neighbours have dogs. It stinks and I am fed up of having to clean it up

Watching this thread with interest. So far I've tried citronella granules, various smelly sprays, sound maker thingies and adult male pee.

The only things that really worked are olbas oil soaked into teabags, but this has quite a limited area and they just move a meter or two away from them to poo instead. Also I'm not too keen as I think the ingredients are bad for cats but hopefully they aren't in the habit of eating teabags!

You can buy plastic "spikes" (bendy and blunt) in sheets that work very well but cover such a tiny area it's not worth it. It helped to regrow a small patch of lawn but that's it.

What I need is a huge blanket of these pretend spikes to cover the entire lawn, that I can roll up quickly and easily when I want to use it or mow it!

It is really difficult. I follow the local FB community page, and it's a village of cat lovers so I don't feel like I can say anything that might be construed as anti-cat/ anti outdoor cats. Every few posts are about cats going missing, so I don't want to make an 'awareness' post about how others pets might affect other residents quality of life.

When it was the height of Summer when we moved in last year, it made me gag how badly the cat mess stank outside the house. We spent so long tidying all the muck that had accumulated in the front and the back. We thought it might have been lazy previous tenants with pets until we lived here and saw the amount of random cats knocking about in the garden.

I found plastic bottles half filled with water and laid on the side helped - they didn’t seem to like the movement of the water or the light on it. I had to put a good number of them down though - bloody PITA. Also stood canes in the worst areas. We got a dog a few years back and he seems to deter them, but that’s a drastic measure!

Cats will return to the patch they shit on, so you have to make sure you remove every trace of them 🤢

The cat spike mats have been quite effective, so far. It's covered a small area, so I used nylon mesh and cocktail sticks to cover the rest and there's been no digging/ poo in that area. Sadly, the rest of the garden is a free for all and I can't afford to keep forking out.

My only advice would be get a dog or a cat yourself. Then they’ll be less likely to come in your garden. There is nothing you can do really to deter them. Cats will be cats and if you’re in a village of cat lovers and multiple cat households you’re not going to stop them coming in your garden

I'm of the , cats should be kept indoors, brigade. I have an outdoor catio for mine. I can't believe how many cats get killed on the road every year!
I've heard you can buy lion poo, not sure if it works though.

Have you tried lions roar, it's dried pellets soaked in lions poo, put it around the garden and the cats think holy shit (excuse the pun) that's one big cat been here. You can get it on Amazon.

I have this problem- I’m one of the few houses that have a grass back garden instead of slabs. Next door’s garden is overgrown so they avoid that.
My garden is the local cat playground - I have to get the litter picker out before my son can play.

I have a cat. They are very well behaved don’t cause issue anywhere in our garden.

If you do want to deter them then try planting coleus, or making your garden wildlife friendly and a hunt worthy location. They don’t shit where they hunt.

Would one of those waving sprinklers work? The ones that spray in a rainbow/arc? That would cover a fair area. A motion activated one would limit the water used.

I've seen those... Have you tried them? I'm looking for an effective tried and true method (I've scoured forums).

The only method that seems to be super effective is motion activated water sprayers but I don't have access to an outdoor water source, unless we pay for a plumber to fit a tap. That would truly be a last resort because I would be pissed off having to pay hundreds more to get this issue resolved.

Try getting a really hot chilli sauce and adding it to water in a spray bottle and spray it in the worst affected areas. The cats won't go near it and it shouldn't hurt any plants or animals.

We have three cats who decided to use next door's gravelled garden as a litter tray. What worked to stop this was our neighbour collected up all the cat poo, put it in a bag with some of the gravel and I used this to make an outdoor cat litter tray at the bottom of our garden. Neighbour also put down lots of quartered oranges.

The cats immediately just started using our garden to poo.I think the combination of the smell and the adversity to citrus orientated them to use our garden. Which is fine, as they're our cats. It's been a few months now and no problems. They had been pooing next door for about six months (they hadn't told us earlier) so not as entrenched as the cats you're talking about, but it had become very habitual.

I was very relieved, as were our neighbours.

Op I feel your pain, I have tried everything to no avail. I still regularly find cat poo in my garden. I am also surrounded by neighbours with lots of cats

Out of interest, do you make sure your cats have toileted in a litter box/ your garden before they roam (if that's possible?)
I want to make my garden wildlife friendly, but not so cats can hunt. I hear that's really detrimental to ecology.

Garlic granules worked when I was trying to stop my cats pooing in my neighbours garden - I bought loads of stuff for them but this seemed the best deterrent of the bunch!!!