Totally rookie gardening question: if I plant daffodils or tulips, they'll come up again next year?

Yes. Sometimes in exciting new places if the squirrels relocate them for you.

I don't want to mess with fussy the first time out. Daffodils it is!

I went crazy and planted Butterfly Daffodils last fall, I'm so excited to see them come up.

For tulips, you run into critter problems as they're tasty, and they don't naturalize like Daffs can, instead tending to diminish year after year. But the Giant Darwin Hybrids and the species Tulips are more reliable. I pretty much treat Tulips as annuals and chuck them into the woods when they're done blooming. Gives me a chance to play with a new combination the next year.

My neighbor advocates planting bulbs, then planting bricks/rocks/flagstones over them until spring to prevent squirrel theft. She went through a LOT of new bulbs. I think once they've been there a while, they are safer from the squirrels. Stuff that's coming up now was not my doing, came with the house.

My mother planted chionodoxa and scilla in the lawn, and the squirrels dug them up and hid them elsewhere. Then forgot about them. So they came up in other random parts of the lawn. Squirrel gardeners!

I had a coworker who laid chicken wire over the bulbs. The chipmunks just dug down outside the chicken wire and tunneled over and got them anyway.

When I planted bulbs in '09, I planted them with a bit of used, strained cat litter. The major contaminants weren't there, but there was enough cat pee residue to keep the squirrels away. And the litter itself (World's Best Cat Litter), is made of corn, so it's essentially mulch.

I put clean soil on top of everything, so my neighbors didn't have to deal with eau d'cat pee when they walked by. The squirrels didn't touch any of the bulbs the first winter and only dug up a few last winter. I may need to retreat them this fall. Luckily I have an unending supply of predator-scented bulb planting mulch.

I live in a former pecan orchard and have squirrels living in my attic, and find they don't mess with crocus tommasinianus, grape hyacinth, ipheion, or most daffodils. Maybe they're just too busy taking a single bite out of each unripe tomato I grow.

First time I put down Deer Scram, I thought it smelled fabulously like pizza (it has oregano in it). The next day I kept looking for the rotting body of an animal and finally realized it was the repellent.

> just too busy taking a single bite out of each unripe tomato I grow.

ohhhhh I hate that.

I can vouch for this stuff: [link]

We have squirrel gangs that wage food fights for sport. It scares them away. Except for the tomatoes.

One year we had planted dozens of Allium Gladiator, which as an onion is supposedly yucky and critter proof. Someone kept digging them up, these tennis ball sized bulbs, gnawing on them, declaring them disgusting, and tossing them aside. We'd pop them back in. Someone would dig them up again and gnaw a little more. This went on for several days before the squirrels got the right memo out to the neighborhood.