I had to laugh when I read this. We have a Ginger Tom cat, (yellow) named John Wayne, who makes it his mission to bed up and sleep or lust lay around in my planters, which I might add, are identical to yours. I cut hardware cloth to fit the tops of my planters and stuck Bambo skewers pointed ends up all in the planters where the outfit couldn't lay in the planters. I couldn't have anything in them, he didn't dig in them, just lay in them and wallowed my plants till he killed them. Wish I had a pix of it, but right now, I don't know where they are. It's the only thing that worked for me. I tried sticking plastic forks tine ends up in them, but he just knocked those out. Apparently, that hardware cloth has spring to it and when he got on it, it moved and scared him. You know how goofy cats are, that with the skewers worked