Racoons, skunks, groundhogs, mice, rats, and possums will come for miles to get it long before it could possibly provide any benefits to plants.

Dave

My feeding procedure for my cat takes a bag of dry food and divides it into 3 pint ziploc bags. I place food in the dish every 4 hours and take the food up that he doesn't finish. Near the bottom of the ziploc, most of whats left is fine particles. At a certain point, I break out a new bag and dump the old one. I'm thinking about mixing the remainder into a container. I guess it may draw stray cats. My main question is will it help the plants.

My cat wants to come live at your house.

Dave answered your question quite well in his last post imho.

Not to mention that it will cause putrid soil in your container, unbeneficial bacteria and mold. That's if there's any soil left once the rodents and raccoons dig it all out looking for whatever stinks in the container, that's no joke either.

That stuff would have too be composted first before it would be "safe" to use.

garf - what is it you think it might supply?

I suppose it would depend in great part on the brand of cat food since the ingredients vary so widely. But nitrogen, in the form of the protein in meat/fish by-products, would require substantial decomposition before it would be plant-useble. I would assume the same would hold true for any source of P or K it 'might' contain. Calcium? A year from now. Maybe. Boron, iron, magnesium? Is any of that even in cat food? Iron, maybe in very small amounts.

It's one of those "it might help but I can't imagine how and could really hurt thanks to the pests" situations IMO.

If you HAVE to do something with it feed it to the wildlife away from the garden.

Dave

2 days ago, I stirred about 2 oz of dry cat food into one of the smaller pots. So far, nothing has disturbed it. After 1 or 2 weeks, I will place a small plant into the pot and see what happens.

Today something dug up a container I had added Tomato Tone to. SO, I set up a trap and caught a small possum. Tomorrow, I dispose of the carcass.

Gone.

Does tomato fertilizer attract pests? Or did the critter just happen to dig up that particular pot?

It was a pot that I had just pulled a plant from, and just added some Tomato Tone to. No other pot was disturbed.

The trap has claimed another possum. A big one this time.

This one got lucky. It got shipped out intact. It was released alive a few miles from my place.

TomatoTone is not a very good fertilizer anymore but it remains a wonderful critter magnet.

Which fertilizers are better?

Possum #3 also got a free ride down the road.

The trap was tripped twice without catching anything. The first time, the bait was eaten. I've never known this trap to fail before.

Today the bait was gone without tripping the trap. Something out there is smarter than I am.

Garf - TomatoTone is just not very strong anymore. If you are using in in well ammended soil I imagine it is fine. I grow in containers and Earthboxes and the last year I used it everything was struggling. I still have a 20LB bag left and I will apply it much more liberally.

#4 possum was a biter. He did a job on the bait tray. This was baited with catnip.

The jury is in. One container has cat food mixed in, the others had Tomato Tone. The one plant thriving is the one that had cat food. The others are dead or dying. I have no doubt what I will use next year. The plant with cat food is still growing and is 5 times the size as the others and still blooming. We'll see what a Miami summer does to it. Next season I will buy a huge bag of cat food even if I have to go to Costco.

This is a duplicate thread about the same issue and a 4 year old one at that. So the point is what? That plants you supposedly fed cat food to 4 years ago are still alive, 5 times the size and still blooming?

See http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/2240252/dry-cat-food-as-fertilizer?n=7

Dave

I ended up with 4 different threads referencing cat food for fertilizer because I had trouble locating the threads to repost in.

Uh Huh. We believe you. Sure we do. Not.

It's not a good idea to be nasty.

It's also not a good idea to spam the message boards with multiple duplicate posts and then keep dragging them up years later.

Dave

The idea of using cat food (or dog food, or people food, or aardvark food) for plants is kind of amusing. Hey, it's food, isn't it? But what plants need is really not what cats need. Protein does a plant absolutely no good, directly at least. Plants simply can't absorb proteins. But sure, the proteins will eventually break down, essentially compost, and produce plant nutrients. But that takes a while. I think there was a discussion in another thread recently about whole wheat crackers as plant food. Same deal. It's basically mulch with some protein in it, and that mulch will eventually compost. But it's a really expensive kind of mulch.

Will a plant do better with cat food than without? Sure. Will a plant do better with cat food than regular compost? Probably not. Your one-plant evidence for the power of cat food isn't convincing. Sorry.

Maybe Costco will start selling lots of cheap cat food to gardeners!

why don't you try it Garf - for your lunch perhaps, Food's food, amirite?

I'll pass on that. The cat food I used would have been wasted because of a change of food recommended by the vet. It didn't work out, so rather than dump it, I used it in the containers. Over time I have to empty the cats feed bowl because of an accumulation of small food particles in the bottom of the bowl that he won't eat. I put this in a ziploc to use in the containers.

That makes sense. Instead of dumping cat food in the trash, throw it on your compost pile. Although I have a local population of possums and coons who love the stuff and don't mess with my gardens. They often rummage around in my compost pile anyway.