It is possible to cultivate your garden when there are Real cats around, but the price of celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated Real gardener

The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already been touched on. Other possible defences are:

1. The Things that Rattle, Bang, Whizz and Whirr

Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we haven't had any moles since installing them. We've never had any moles, actually.

2. The Wire Maze

Real cats step over it.

3. Chemical warfare, including the Mysterious Blobs, the Terrible Dust and the Curious Gungy Stuff

Since it always rains incessantly imediately, this barrage is laid down, we've never found out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably there's some international Accord that no one's bothered to tell us about.

The point is that the cat's desire to get onto your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it shouts. Which leads us on to:

4. The Big Roll of Wire Netting

The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions when They Find An Impenetrable Barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious Seeds!!!

You can make little wire bootees for the beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your more valuable apple trees in demure corsets of wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up, and 3) the fact that plants grow through the wire.

This doesn't matter with things like onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes and they had to be dug up as a unit. But if you can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:

5. The Catapult

But we're not that kind of people.

The Real cat and children

Ah. They can grow up together.

Well, not really. By the time the average child is no longer doing Winston Churchill impersonations the kitten has grown up and, unless Measures have been Taken, has a family of its own. Kittens and children get on like a house on fire—and just think about what it's actually like in a house on fire…