While my husband and I have had a perennial flower garden for a while and are in our second year of a raised bed vegetable garden, I'm in brand new territory with a patch of mostly annuals for cutting. I love bouquets of flowers, but not bouquet prices.
Two of our biggest pests are slugs and birds. I am employing some Pinterest inspired deterrence to see if they work and so far---success! The eggshells have deterred any slugs and the cds/computer hard drive disks have deterred birds.
The local birds love to go after bugs in the ground like woodpeckers on trees. So this disk trick is a keeper. To say nothing of the unexpected benefit of very faint, delicate wind chimes that the disks and bamboo stake combo makes. Well worth trying for both reasons!
Now to figure out something for those squirrels...