A pic would help. Are they anything like the woolly aphids in the pix at the link below? If you think it's a bug, try one of these sprays: CITRUS SPRAY FOR APHIDS: Boil 2 cups water in a saucepan. Remove from heat and add the peel of 1 lemon or grapefruit. Cover, leave overnight. Mix half water and half citrus liquid, and use as a spray for aphids and other soft-bodied pests. The spray must come into contact with the pests to be effective. FUNGICIDE/POWDERY MILDEW SPRAY: 4 litres water 3 tablespoons bicarbonate of soda 1 tablespoon household bleach 1 teaspoon dishwashing detergent Snip and remove leaves that are worst affected. Mix ingredients with water. Spray remaining leaves top and undersides. Apply a heavier dose on leaves that have signs of infection and only lightly on unaffected leaves as bleach can actually harm and discolor the leaves. BASIL SPRAY: Pour 1 litre of boiling water over 2 firmly packed cupfuls of basil leaves. Leave to get cold, strain. Use within a few days. Basil spray will deter and sometimes kill aphids, woolly aphids, flies, fruit flies, leaf-miners, mosquitoes, scale, spider mites, thrips, whitefly, bugs, caterpillars, earwigs, millipedes, beetles, slaters, spiders and weevils. CANOLA OIL SPRAY: Mix 1 part canola oil into 50 parts water (approximately 1 tablespoon oil to 1 litre water). Add a few drops of diswashing detergent and shake well. Spray tops and bottoms of leaves and stems generously to get rid of aphids, mealy bugs, spider mites, soft scale or earwigs. CHIVE SPRAY: An infusion of 1 litre of water and 1 cup of chopped leaves is a mild insect repellent, a fungicide and an antiseptic. It may assist in the treatment of downy or powdery mildew if applied regularly. Use the spray within a few hours. You can also try a Garlic Spray, a Coriander Spray (using the leaves made into a strong tea), a Eucalyptus Spray (using the leaves made into a tea, or some diluted essential oil), Nasturtium Spray (if it's aphid) , Mint or Lavender or Lemongrass (as a tea, if it's aphid), Chamomile (if it's a fungus). Or Rhubarb (leaf tea) or Tomato (leaf tea) (both for assorted bugs). Pyrethrum is a good all-rounder. http://gardening.about.com/od/gardenproblems/qt/PowderyMildew.htm All these will wash off easily to make the rosemary safe to eat, and won't affect the flavour. Here is a link that might be useful: woolly aphid

Mia, Yes , I think it will work. Interplanting tomatoes with other crops is something I do all the time. I often grow smaller plants like lettuce and carrots underneath and between tomato plants, essentially using them as a living mulch beneath the taller tomato plants. I also mix all kinds of herbs into the tomato beds as well, and think those herbs help explain how I grow so many tomato plants and yet only rarely see even a single tomato hornworm or fruit worm. You sometimes will get less yield per plant when you interplant multiple kinds of crops together using close spacing, but since you have a lot more plants occupying the soil, you still get a good harvest . The best carrot crop I ever had was a result of me broadcast sowing lettuce and carrot seed randomly into the tomato bed after the tomato plants already had been transplanted into the ground. My garden was smaller then and I had run out of space, so was packing as much into each bed as I possibly could. I just thinned carrots and lettuce after they sprouted. When I grow onions with tomato plants, normally I hammer a stake into the ground where each tomato plant will be planted later, and leave a small unplanted spot there as I plant the onions. When it it time to transplant the tomato plants into the ground, I put one tomato plant next to each stake. If I have to pull up a couple of onions to make room for a tomato transplant, it isn't a big deal . We eat those onions as scallions. I started interplanting multiple types of plants together long ago, after reading John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables...." book. It is amazing how much you can pack into even a small space when you interplant. Even when I grow tomato plants in molasses feed tubs, I generally have pepper plants, herbs and flowers mixed into each container with the tomato plants. Look at how Mother Nature mixes everything up together. On the eastern edge of our woodland, for example, we have native pecan and oak trees growing as the dominant plants, but underneath them we have wild cherries, American persimmons, possumhaw hollies, and redbuds, and beneath those understory trees we have American beautyberry bushes, native blackberries, inland sea oats and brushy bluestem, peppervines and several native wildflowers which ebb and flow with the seasons. All of them happily co-exist. Why can't our gardens be the same way? To garden bio-intensively in this manner, you need to pay careful attention to soil fertility and irrigation (if adequate rainfall is not being received). Obviously when you interplant several types of edible crops together, the plants will be competing with one another. I get smaller onions in interplanted beds than I get from onions grown in a monoculture with recommended spacing, but still get tons of onions. We still have several dozen onions from last year's crop, though now they are starting to sprout. There pretty much is nothing grown in our veggie garden that isn't interplanted with several other things. If I ever were to plant even one single monoculture bed, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the way it looked and would be out there trying to fix the bed by adding more stuff to it. In fact, I do have my onions planted as monoculture beds right now, but that is because they are the only thing I've put into the ground so far this year. The onions will not be alone in those beds for long. Hope this helps , Dawn

Hi Dawna, Thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to put together a little info sheet for everyone because the pests are so bad this year, and everyone has had a lot of questions. It sure has been raining a lot up your way. I hope all is well there. At least we aren't having to worry about wildfires or a hay shortage this year. Flooding, however, may be this summer's big issue. Dawn

I haven't had any luck with any of the companion planting either. I planted garlic and it had black aphids all over it lol same with marigolds. While my peppers still had green aphids. Best thing is diligent surveying of your plants, and spraying them off with water. I tried Neem and it never really worked for me either at least for long term deterrence. The one thing I found that actually seemed to keep them off was this peppermint/rosemary oil spray I got from walmart. Either that or they got tired of me spraying and squishing them.