Hi Topjimmy, It is so neat to hear from a passionate gardener trying to protect his/her crop! Warms my heart. Everybody has given you excellent advise. Step one is always to figure out exactly what is eating your vegies so you can fix the problem. I have a couple of ideas for pictures 1-3 and I think I might know the culprit in picture 4.
Culprit in #4.... I get them every now and then on my eggplants mostly and they're easy to deal with. Teeny, tiny little black beetles about the size of a piece of black pepper that are really hard to see. I usually just find a couple on the inderside of the leaves. They hop away quickly. I just spray the plant with some neem oil and they're gone instantly. But I wouldn't spray oil on a squash plant, especially not in super hot Texas so maybe someone else has a better suggestion for what to use. But they're not hard to get rid of.
Lucy68 said to put out a trap can with an inch or two of beer inside. Great suggestion. You do have to bury the can in the dirt down to the rim so the bugs can get in easily. I know it will trap pill bugs and roaches. I have roaches here but they never cause a problem. Anyway, This trap will rule out pill bugs. I have a huge problem with them here but that doesn't look like pill bug damage to me.
Pirl mentioned earwigs. That very well looks like it could be earwig damage. Especially because they are attacking leaves all over the plant but mostly toward the bottom. If so you can.... go out at the crack of dawn, that's usually the best time to see them feeding OR you can make the same kind of trap using a can buried down in the dirt and put in an inch of vegetable oil with a few drops of oil from a can of tuna fish. I've had an infestation of earwigs in the past and they love tuna oil. You would find lots of them in the trap in a day or two.
But you could also have bird damage. I had tiny little gray birds that loved to eat my squashes. My plants would look just like yours. They are tiny so they just sit on the branch and munch away. Drove me nuts! But all my birds got up and flew the coop in 2020. A dozen different species. Just left. A year later new birds came in. These little birds do the same thing but don't like my squashes! Can you believe that. These birds prefer my brassicas. Same damage just different plants. This is a picture I just took of bird damage on one of my cauliflower plants. Damage looks just like that from cabbage loopers. But there were no loopers. And I covered them all in tule to protect them. You can see that there is no more damage to the new growth at the top so I stopped the little buggers. You could try throwing some tulle or bird netting over the top to see what happens.
Hope this helps. Happy gardening everyone.
