I put in the tiniest food garden this year. It was going really well, until groundhogs ate everything down to leafless stalks, everything except the onions. So, I enclosed all my then still small plants in little cages, and everything sprang back. I felt like a pro.
Then the groundhogs figured out they could just pull those down, and left me with a garden mostly full of leafless stalks a second time.
I was about to give up, when my daughter came and built me a fence around the whole plot that would keep them out. whew!
That worked great until deer figured out they could hop in there now, and ate most of it down to leafless stalks for a third time.
I put protrusions everywhere in the plot. If a deer jumped in they would get caught in it. Idk what I would have done if a deer had done that, but none did.
Miraculously, I had food! More than I could eat. I didn't have to go to the farmer's market much at all.
I've always thought veggie gardening had to be too much work to make it worth the effort, and perhaps monetarily in the old normal it would have been for me. But I now have a jar of pickles, a batch of ratatouille, and some peeled tomatoes put by for winter in addition to some okra, zucchini, tomatoes, swiss chard, onions and tobacco still to harvest. Amazing!!!