Maybe a week or so later, most of them are dead. It looks like something ate them, but I don't know what it was. Basically, shortly after I planted them, the leaves started to show signs of having been eaten, a little more each day, and soon all the leaves had been eaten away from almost every little plant. The stems withered away soon after, on most of them.

I inspected the leaves, and could find no caterpillars. I don't live in an area where either rabbits or deer have ever shown up. (I'm in McKinney, Texas, just outside of Dallas.) No moles or groundhogs or anything like that, either. And nothing was eating or even slightly damaging the chard plants in their pots, and the plants which are still in their pots are fine.

I have a lot of trees in my yard, so I have some problems with squirrels. But I've never known the squirrels to eat my plants, just to dig them up while burying or searching for nuts.

I do have some problems with cutworms, but I didn't think they would eat leaves, just cut off a plant at the base. And I've never had them get every single seedling that I put out; two or three out of dozens, maybe.

There are squash, cucumber, and melon plants right next to the chard. Nothing has touched any of them.

And, in fact, I've got a row of lettuces in a bed maybe 25 feet away, and most of them are untouched. I've lost a few, some to squirrels, some to what I think were cutworms (plants eaten down to the base; some recovered, some didn't), but I didn't lose nearly as many lettuces as I did chard.

So, any ideas? Grasshoppers? I haven't seen any, but maybe? Do birds go after leafy greens? My birdbath, a birdhouse, and some suet hangers are all nearby, but it looked, really, more like insect or caterpillar damage. Is it the cutworms, after all?

Can you post an image of a partially damaged plant? It would provide us w/ some clues to the culprit.

Agree that slugs is a real possibility but so are several other things. You'll need to do some night time investigations to rule out slugs.

Dave