Growing garden and shitting cats

My wife is terrible at being a restraining influence. Not only did she let me know that she'd never tried rhubarb before:

She also insisted, insisted I tell you, that I buy a gooseberry bush:

I believe her exact turn of phrase was, "You can if you want to." That villain!

And then compounded it by letting me cook her an experimental recipe with aubergine and deeming it "quite nice"!

I can't take any responsibility for this, really I can't. She's practically forced me.

In news which isn't about my rapidly expanding garden portfolio, I've finished setting up the nets for the brassica and we're now just awaiting the seedlings being large enough to transplant outside. I don't think it'll happen this weekend, as the weather's still filthy, but I'll work on gradually acclimating them to outside weather across the next fortnight and plant them out on the weekend of the 5th.

Pest control's becoming a big thing at the moment - I'm now set up to keep the caterpillars away from my brassica, but the new challenge is trying to persuade next door's cats that my nicely dug beds are not their new toilet, in particular my bed of onion sets which don't take kindly being dug up, shat upon and then reburied upside down. So far they've ignored pepper and citrus, were entirely unbothered by lion dung, and were gently amused by the motion detecting robot that was supposed to scare them away with ultrasonics. The only thing that's made even the slightest bit of difference is a commercial product Catapult which a) costs a bit, b) requires reapplication with the slightest bit of rain, c) is a sod to apply as it's a squirty bottle that just coats me if the wind catches it, which leads us onto d) it smells so terrible that it drives me out of the garden, let alone the cats.

Plan B is to cover the bed in netting, but that'll be a pain in the arse cause it's an awkward shape and me and netting don't get on at the best of times. It generally ends up with a tangled mess that sort of covers the bed, detaches in the wind within 5 minutes and trips me up the next time I go down that end of the garden. When I finally get around to reattaching the netting, I get it so firmly secured that I then can't move it in order to get to the crops myself. There's a reason I've gone for expensive prefab cages for the square beds!

Anyone got any suggestions for deterring cats? Please, no suggestions involving shotguns - I'm close enough to the edge that I might consider them.

PJW