I'm trying my hand at straw-bale gardening this year, thinking yep, this'll finally help keep the rabbits from munching everything in sight. But now I'm thinking maybe it wasn't always just them. The tomatoes went in ok, so did the parsley. Then I put some soil over an area & started cukes. After they came up I was so happy and was lamenting the chore of thinning, which I always hate to do because I never like killing useful plants.

Looks like something took care of that for me. The cukes all looked fine late one evening, but I got up the next morning to find most of them chewed off. One was left that looked heavily bug-bitten, with the telltale rounded indentations & all. The rest looked like they'd been lopped almost/or completely off by something like a cutworm. I pulled out a few fly strips & placed them all around the sown area. Next morning, the most recently emerged ones were also cut down to the stems, and nothing I'd consider suspect was caught in the fly tape. Today, I noticed that the parsley in a nearby container was also munched, but strangely not the ones in the straw.

Could it be more than one culprit? Possibilities are rabbits and birds, but I do have a lot of earwigs & pillbugs around.

I'd like to hear your best guess, as I'm ready to wage an all-out WAR on these invisible beasts. I never even had this much trouble growing them in the ground!