Thank youuuuu!!
Possums, thankfully (and touch wood) aren’t a problem here. There is some kind of animal that started having a munch on my plants, but I’ve worked out that if there are sweet peas, that it beelines for that and leaves everything else alone, so I have a small part of my flowerbed stocked with sacrificial sweet peas haha. It works so far. Slugs are a problem though, way more than caterpillars. Every morning I go and inspect it with my cuppa and wipe the underside of the leaves. There’s almost always little caterpillar eggs on them, so I nip them in the bud before they can become an issue. There’s not much I can do about the slugs and snails though. I put the gel barrier down and keep it mulched because they apparently don’t like crossing mulch, but if I go out there at night I can almost always pick two or three out of the bed. The broccoli heads are starting to get big enough now that I’ll start protecting them at night: you just have to wrap a bit of foil over the top at night and take it off in the morning. It stops anything from getting to the actual broccoli.
I do have broad beans too! And sugar snap peas. I don’t have much luck with beans and peas either. I never get more than a handful of sugar snap peas, even though the plant itself is really healthy. It’s my first time growing broad beans and I head they were easy. They’re going really well and again, the plant is really healthy, heaps of flowers, but no actual beans, so idk 🤷♀️