For Pets

What you can grow for your pets

The idea behind this collection is a simple one: plants you grow for the animals in your house. Greens they can graze on, plants they take an interest in, something living that belongs to them rather than to you. Today that means seed you can sow in a tray or a pot, and the range is expanding. More plants and growing kits for pets are on the way, and as they are ready they will appear on this page. Everything we put here has to work indoors, without a garden and without special equipment, because that is how most people live with a cat.

Greens for grazing

Cats graze on grass, and they have done so for as long as they have lived alongside people. The current example in this range is our cat grass seed mix, a blend of barley, oat, rye, and wheat grass seed. Sown thickly, it comes up as a soft, dense stand of tender green blades, and for a cat that lives indoors a tray of it is simply something green of its own. It is fast, too. Seed goes in, and about one to two weeks later there is a tray of grass to set down on the floor. The step by step is in our cat grass growing guide.

Plants cats respond to

Some plants are less about eating and more about interest. The current example is catnip (Nepeta cataria), which contains a compound called nepetalactone. Many cats, though not all of them, respond to it with a short burst of rolling, rubbing, and play, and the response wears off after a few minutes. A cat that ignores catnip completely is behaving perfectly normally. Set the cats aside and catnip still earns its keep: it is a hardy perennial in the mint family with soft gray-green leaves and small white flowers that bees work steadily through the summer. Our catnip seeds and our catnip growing guide will get you from packet to plant.

Growing them indoors

You do not need a garden for any of this. A shallow tray or a pot of ordinary potting mix on a windowsill is enough. Grasses are sown thickly across the surface, barely covered, kept evenly moist, and set somewhere bright, and they sprout within a few days. A tray gets grazed down over time, so most people sow a fresh one every couple of weeks and keep two going in rotation. Herbs are slower and behave like the perennials they are, wanting warmth, good light, and a few weeks to find their feet before they settle in as a plant you keep for years. Nothing here is difficult, and nothing here needs more than a windowsill and a bag of potting mix.

What to grow around pets

Worth being straight about this part. Giving a pet a plant of its own helps steer it away from yours, which matters more than people expect, because a good number of common houseplants are genuinely not safe for cats. Cat grass and catnip are two of the plants people have grown for cats for a very long time, and they are widely grown for exactly this reason. What we will not do is tell you a plant is safe for your animal, because we do not know your animal. For anything to do with your pet's health, or with what is and is not safe for it to chew on, your veterinarian is the right person to ask.

Why buy from Organo Republic

Every packet we ship is non-GMO, open-pollinated heirloom seed that has been germination tested, so it comes up at a high rate when you sow it. We are a US-based licensed seed dealer, we work directly with trusted growers to keep quality high and prices fair, and every packet carries a QR code that opens a free growing guide for what is inside it. Orders over $49 ship free. When you are done here, browse the rest of what we grow in our full seed catalog.