Thanks for the response.....The black things are hard and cannot be squished and they are easy to just brush off the lilies....Most appear at the joint where the leaf grows out of the stem and in some places there is only one and in others, there appears to be a cluster of the little black "cannonballs"....Can anyone shed any light here??? Joyce

Sorry for not posting more pics, but they are a pain to post in this site given size restrictions for photos. Anyhow, I'm pretty certain it's this moth doing the damage. My garden is infested with them. At night, when I just rattle the branches of any plant I see a bunch of them fly out from underneath the plant. Little blood suckers. I talked to some folks at the garden center nearby and the artichoke plume moth is an opportunistic feeder and certainly does not limit itself to just artichoke. It can eat almost anything and can wipe out a garden. I've been spraying BT everywhere like crazy and this is killing all the caterpillars and larvae but not the adult plume moth itself. They just keep laying their eggs and it'll be a never ending cycle of me spraying BT unless I can figure out a way to get rid of the adult moth itself. I've sprayed spinosad and organic soap and maybe this kills the ones I manage to spray directly, but every night it seems like more and more of these moths are present. Any suggestions on how to kill, deter or get rid of the adult moths from my garden. I heard wasps are natural enemies, but I don't want to grow a wasp nest in my garden. Any suggestions?

Hard to determine the scale of the critters but they look like dead fly larvae, aka maggots.

Heruga, please do not take offense!! And we are not calling you a liar. What we are trying to convey to you is a need to step back a bit and not to panic or overreact. Plant pests are a fact of gardening life. You will never eliminate them all..........nor should you necessarily, as that will upset the natural balance. But they can be managed and often they are best managed by doing very little. Or as little as you can get away with. Sometimes it is just a matter of providing the best growing conditions. Aphids are often attracted to plants that develop a lot of lush new growth from overly rich soils or unnecessary fertilization. Sometimes just growing the plants under leaner or somewhat harsher conditions will significantly reduce the risk of infestation. I will say that in all my many years of gardening, I have never seen aphids actually kill a plant, even very heavy infestations. Spraying down the plants routinely or cutting off the most affected parts (generally the newest growth) does help a lot and will keep populations at manageable levels. And encouraging beneficials or other wildlife to the garden will also make a big difference.........IME, birds are nature's most efficient "insecticide" and the more birds you can attract to the garden, the less pest issues you will you have to deal with. The point we are trying to make is that all gardeners deal with the various issues you have encountered and yet their gardens survive and even thrive. Drought, heavy or persistent rainfall, cold winters, very hot or dry summers, insect problems......we have ALL encountered them and our gardens have lived to tell the tale. What more years of experience gardening will provide is the knowledge of what is a serious problem that needs intervention (or plant replacement or substitution) and what you can safely ignore or treat as innocuously as possible. And the vast majority of us tend to steer away from heavy pesticide usage as we have learned that it upsets the natural order and very often can cause more problems than it solves. And added years of experience will often influence what sort of gardening choices you make. Some plants are just a lot harder to keep happy or are more prone to problems (like indoor citrus) so you need to weigh whether or not the plant justifies the effort. But please take the advice provided by very experienced gardeners not as a criticism but with the good intentions with which it is given. Yes, 50 years of gardening does bring one knowledge, experience and wisdom that just a couple of years doing so does not provide. It is obvious from your posts that you still have much to learn - we are just trying to help you get there :-) And even very experienced gardeners learn something new on almost a daily basis!!