Randall Tuttle’s alarm clock doesn’t ring. It meows.

His four cats – Kitty (“Not very original, but I didn’t name her,” Tuttle says), Blousey, Layla and Nunu – sit by his bed every morning and meow until he sprinkles some catnip on the floor, “and that’s how they get their day going.”

These lucky cats live with the man who makes “Kitty Can’t Cope” sacks filled with organic catnip. Tuttle, who lives in Portland, started his business 20-25 years ago when he became frustrated with the quality of catnip toys he found on retail store shelves. He buys the organic catnip for “Kitty Can’t Cope” – he goes through 8,000 pounds of it a year – from Trout Lake Farm, an organic herb farm in Trout Lake, Washington. Tuttle sells the catnip loose (for adding to cat food) and in 100-percent cotton twill sacks to be used as toys. The silk screening and sewing of the sacks is done locally. Busy season is September through February – the holidays and the months when cats languish indoors.

The feline attractant in the catnip plant, Nepeta cataria (it’s in the same family as mint), is known for turning Fluffy into a stoner cat who rolls around on the ground and rubs up against things while she’s licking and chewing the leaves. Tuttle buys only “tea-grade catnip.”

“A lot of the catnip they have is a mixed grade or toy grade,” he said. “Toy grade is mostly the sticks and stems of the plant with a little bit of leaf. The mixed grade is 50-50 leaf and stems, and what we get is purely the leaf.”

He wants his company to be “the Jaguars and Cadillacs of catnip.”

After the initial high comes the mellowing out – and a very happy cat.

Kitty Can’t Cope can be purchased online or in Hannaford stores, Whole Foods in Portland and Big Y in Biddeford. At Whole Foods, a single “Kitty Can’t Cope” sack and a 1-ounce bag of loose catnip cost $3.49 each.

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