www.inkthinkerblog.com — We bought the palm tree a few months ago to balance out the living room. It started dying immediately. We re-potted it. It kept dying. We tried plant food. It kept dying. We tried watering it more, then less, then the same. It kept dying. We dragged it in front of the sliding door in the afternoons for extra sunlight. It kept dying. On Saturday, we figured out why.
It turns out that Isabel, the cutie pie pictured below, has been peeing in my $80 palm tree since we brought it home. We busted her on Saturday. At first, it seems she did it only every now and then. Based on the length of time we had to run water through the pot to get the cat-pee smell out this weekend, though, it appears that Isabel stepped up her efforts around the time Pickles the pug moved in. We think it started out of curiosity, and got worse because of sibling rivalry.
To prevent recidivism, we’ve moved the plant, thoroughly cleaned and disinfected the spot it used to inhabit, scrubbed the outside of the pot with Clorox to kill any lingering aroma, and covered the dirt with large lava stones so there’s nothing for her to dig in (which actually looks really nice, thank goodness). So far, so good.
The good news is that we’ve solved not only the mystery of the plant, but also the mystery of that strange smell that comes and goes in the living room. But now I need something else to balance out that wall…
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I had the same problem with an indoor ficus tree and one of my cats. My husband put bunched-up deer netting over the soil so that we could water the tree but the cat would find it uncomfortable to walk on. Worked like a charm.
Isabel’s behavior is definitely sibling rivalry. When my first baby was born, the cat I had at the time would poop on the floor under my daughter’s crib, to tell me what she thought of the new human kitten.