That Darn Squirrel

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but there is a VERY unwelcome visitor in my gardens!! It has utterly destroyed my sunflowers and digs ditches in every single container I have. I'm also fairly sure it ate the last of my strawberries before the heat stressed my plants out and they stopped producing anything, even runners.
I'm not the first to complain about them, and the myriad number of suggestions on the internet for driving them away are just boggling.
There wasn't any money for a system that shot pellets at them. I didn't want to put up a sonic alarm because it might disturb my own pets. And programming a water gun using Python to shoot them when they showed up seemed awesome and geeky, but I just don't have the time or appropriate equipment to get it done.
So I resorted to chemical warfare.
After every rain, which sadly but perhaps conveniently for my memory and schedule has been VERY infrequent, I run out and sprinkle cayenne in the pot of every single plant I have. And it has worked! When I only did the lower plants and forgot the plants on my upper deck, I saw the little bastard bypass everything there and scale my deck posts to get upstairs. As soon as I sprinkled it up there... boom, he left that alone and paced back and forth along the cement brick retainer wall that pretends it is my back yard.
I just have to stay on top of it to make sure he leaves things alone, as I just got a SECOND sprout on my ginger and my pumpkin is finally flowering like crazy (I shall have to run outside and do some artificial insemination to see anything by Halloween at this point. Bees are disturbingly few and far between.)
I was upset and sad that he came and ate the flowers off of all the sunflowers I'd grown from seed, the ones that my daughter had helped me plant in the spring with such happy abandon, when Nature did that awesome thing she always does.
She showed me I was pretty stupid in thinking she just gave up that easily.
My sunflowers are atrocious and would win no awards, but currently they have new growth sticking out of the top of the stems that were chewed down to nothing and the leaves stripped. And in the middle of all of that.... a single flower perked open as if to say... "F*** YOU SCIUROMORPH!!"
I am going to protect that tiny flower, and any of its brethren that show up, with my life. And the cayenne wars will continue, because I want this bastard OUT OF MY LIFE.

NATURE FINDS A WAY. UP YOURS, SQUIRREL!