I've planted some mulberry trees and some American Cranberry Bushes. The ACBs are mature enough to produce berries, but the mulberries will take a few more years in the ground because I started them from whips. I usually provide fruit on a sturdy plastic plate on the patio table. This is a typical menu: apple chunks, a dollop of grape jam, a slice of orange, and raisins soaked over night. If they're on sale, I might throw in some red seedless grapes cut in half. As I said, mockingbirds adore the jam, but so do catbirds if you have them. They as well as cardinals and jays will eat the apple chunks. The orange slice is a favorite for woodpeckers and flickers, the Terminators of the ant world. Robins will come for the raisins and grapes. In the summer, put out the fruit just after you're finished gardening. It makes great after work entertainment and the robins will stick around for hours later to see what other edibles you have around the house. By the time a few months go by, they'll start coming around just when they see you outside with a shovel! There are many birds that eat insects during the summer but not during the winter, hummingbirds for example. So I would suggest having a good all around feeder set up to attract the most clients as possible. :)

Agree Buck that they are most likely black aphids (alternative discussed below) and your Safer soap spray should take care of them. A few won't harm the tomato plants but the black aphids are self-fertile and multiply worse than rabbits so keep and eye out. Keep in mind that they are attracted to excess N go easy on the feeding. Water blasting works for what are called green peach aphids - the most common kind seen on garden plants - and they are green and/or white and don't fly so blasting them off works. But ants "farm" aphids like we do cattle and milk them for the dew they excrete so ants will actually carry them around to plants - hey you got to go where the grass is greener. ;) Now as to the alternative - you mention holes in the leaves. Aphids don't usually make holes - they are juice suckers. But flea beetles do make holes - common description is the leaves look like they were shotgunned - so look up flea beetles pic and make sure what you have. Flea beetles are also very tiny and hop just like a dog flea does when startled. Hang in there. The fun has only just begun. ;) Dave

Those little green worms are cabbage worms and they will do a number on any brassica, altho cabbage suffers the most. Carbaryl is a contact insecticide with a very short life once it gets wet. I am simply saying that the biological Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)which is a stomach poison is the most effective of the worm control agents available to the home gardener. Since the worms ( butterfly or moth larva) have to ingest it, it can be used as a preventative. It is organic approved. I am not organic and I use carbaryl when I have an infestation of beetles on which it is very effective. Carbaryl is pretty benign and I have no fear of it, but there are folks who will pitch a hissy fit about its use. Carbaryl will accomplish your purpose with periodic applications.

If you're seeing cabbage root fly maggots now, I am really surprised because they are cool-season pests, and Oklahoma is hot, hot, hot right now. I've gardened in Texas (80 miles south of where I garden now in Oklahoma) and Oklahoma all my life and never seen a cabbage root fly either in the maggot form or the fly form. Leaf hoppers are everywhere every year. I just ignore them. Aphids are most abundant on plants fed heavily with nitrogen or in new beds heavily enriched with nitrogen. I believe the reason is that extra fertilizer creates extra carbs and the insects find the extra carbs to be especially attractive. Some years the aphids are worse than others. People here tell me it is a bad aphid year, but other than seeing a few on my cabbage and broccoli a month or two ago, I'm not seeing them. Just use a sharp spray of water from the hose to wash them off the back of the leaves. Do this once or twice a day and they'll get tired of it and leave. If they are driving you nuts, you can try spraying the backs of the leaves with either a commercial (not home-made) insecticidal soap or neem oil. I don't do either unless they are incredibly heavy and the water spray doesn't dislodge them. Tiny hoppers. Yes, they most likely are just the younger instars of the grasshoppers. In my garden, the tiny ones show up in March and April and occasionally are still hatching out in May. I put out Semaspore weekly while the hoppers are small and after that I generally do nothing unless the infestation is extremely high, which it is this year. Semaspore and other products with the same active ingredient generally are not effective on the larger instars and it is expensive, so using it after they've gotten bigger than 1/4" to 1/2" would be a waste of money. I'm going to link a document about grasshopper control. The problem with any method of grasshopper control is that new hoppers migrate in every week....if not every day, so no matter what you do, more of them just keep coming. This year I bought EcoBran and am ready to use it. If I use it, it will be the first chemical pesticide I've used in well over a decade, but last year the hoppers destroyed certain crops, and I think they already are present in heavier numbers now than they were at this time last year. They're probably my biggest garden problem in the years when their population peaks. They're not a big problem every year. In our garden, the grasshoppers usually attack these plants in this specific order every year: lemon balm, catnip, catmint, potatoes, mint, basil, beans, peas. In the worst years they then move to to tomatoes and peppers. This year, they're already damaging the tomato and pepper plants, which they usually don't do until July or August here. I ignore root maggots. There's always one here and there, but they aren't present in large enough numbers to cause significant damage. In my garden, there are probably thousands of bugs present on any given day. I don't worry about 99.9% of them. Your garden, just like the world at large, is an ecosystem. You'll always have bugs. The alternative is to nuke your garden with such heavy dosages of chemical pesticides that everything in your garden becomes heavily contaminated with chemicals. I just won't do it. I'd give up my garden before I began spraying broad-spectrum pesticides. There are very few pests in your garden that will do enough damage to become a problem for home gardeners, so I mostly ignore them. With the pests that are troublesome, I prefer to hand-pick and destroy them and their eggs above all other methods because then I'm hurting only the pest insects and not the beneficial insects. The worst thing anyone can do is spray their garden with a broad-spectrum pesticide that wipes out the good bugs that help keep the bag bugs under control. Learn to tolerate a healthy bug population. Then, when your child or grandchild, a niece or nephew, or the child of a friend or neighbor is working on their Insect Collection for school, you'll be the most popular person in town. When our son and our friends' children were at the 'insect collection' age in school, my garden (and our screened-in back porch) were the most popular places in town. A kid could drop by, spend an hour or so, and pick up 25-50 different kinds of insects for their collection. After a while, I could pretty much identify them on sight for the kids and could refer them to the best websites for ID and proper scientific names and such. It can be amazingly difficult for a 'city kid' in an area with heavy pesticide use to find enough insects for their insect collection, but in our yard and garden they found tons. Floating row cover is a godsend. I have 5,000 square feet of it but don't use it for much in terms of excluding insects. It is great for excluding squash pests. Otherwise I mostly use it for freeze/frost protection where it saved my garden a couple of times this year from late freezes. For pests of the brassica family, buy and use Bt 'Kurstaki'. It works only on caterpillar type pests and is not toxic to others. Do be sure you avoid putting it on flowers to which butterflies and moths would be attracted because it has the potential to kill them. Generally for brassica family crops like cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms, I just handpick them off the plants (wear disposable latex or nitrile gloves if you don't want to touch them) and drop them into a cup or bucket. Then I take them to the chicken coop and toss them in there for the poultry to devour. As an alternative you can drop them into a bowl of soapy water and drown them, or drop them on the ground and squish them with your foot. If you check the backs of the leaves for them and remove them (and their eggs) while they are small, you can eliminate them. However, you have to remain vigilant because there's always more of them coming. This year they haven't been nearly as bad as they were last year. Accept that your garden and yard are an ecosystem and you'll always have insects, both good and bad. Avoid panic when you see them. It is not often that pest populations are high enough to create a significant issue. For each pest that is a problem, use integrated pest management. Use narrow-spectrum solutions aimed at that specific pest. Try to avoid doing anything that will hurt your beneficial insects and they'll help keep the pest insects under control. Just about every year I have one pest or the other that is more of a problem in that specific year than it normally is. Last year it was grasshoppers and Colorado Potato Beetles. This year we had relatively few CPBs but hoppers are bad again this year. This is not unusual as grasshopper populations cycle up and down. Once they peak (last year was, I hope, their peak, although this year could be), their population slowly cycles back down after several years. I just do not get very excited about most insects. Our world is an ecosystem and they are a part of it. When they are doing damage, I do what I can to control them to the best of ability, and then I just don't get too wound up over them above and beyond that. They aren't worth getting upset over, spending vast sums of money to combat (you'll never get rid of them all, and if you did, more would move in) or fretting over. The pests I think worth spending time and money to combat (if their numbers warrant) is very small and would include these: cabbage loopers and cabbage worms Colorado potato beetles squash bugs and squash vine borers grasshoppers blister beetles and leaf-footed bugs I don't get too excited over tomato and tobacco hornworms because they seldom do much damage at all to my plants. I don't worry much about corn earworms or Eurpoean corn borers because they can be cut out of the ears of corn after it is harvested. I ignore leaf miners and flea beetles as they rarely do enough harm to any of my plants to actually hurt them. I let lady bugs take care of the bugs they like to eat. Other beneficial insects eat other pesty things. Birds, frogs, toads, and other reptiles and amphibians take care of lots of the insects. We have a young male kitten who has made it his mission in life to play with and kill every grasshopper he sees. Let's use Colorado Potato Beetles as an example of a pest that may or may not be a problem in a given year. A few showed up this year but not all that many. I handpicked maybe 30 or 40 over a 3-month period. As soon as the Assasin bugs showed up, I stopped handpicking them and let the Assasin bugs take care of them. However, last year they were a huge problem and we had hundreds and hundreds of them. We have 14.5 acres and every one of them is just crawling with bugs. On the approximate 12.5 acres that we don't even mow, are the insects doing significant harm to the plants? Nope. So, why knock myself out worrying about them on the 2 acres where we have our lawn, garden and other landscaping? I don't. I simply try to control the ones that I know from experience will damage a crop enough that I won't get a harvest from it. Most insects have a purpose in life and I try not to interfere with it. For example, I am not at all fond of blister beetles. However, they do eat grasshopper eggs. So, even though my initial inclination is to kill one when I see it eating a tomato plant, I try to just flick it off the plant and leave it alone, hoping it will get hungry for some grasshopper eggs and eat them instead. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Grasshopper Control Page from Planet Natural