Ok, so I have done some research and some shopping. For the little caterpillars eating up the young leaves, whatever they are, I got a small bottle of a product containing BT and sprayed that last night. I've also found basic instructions for making an insecticidal soap concentrate that I can easily mix up with other additives or use on it's own when needed. It is the one where you mix 1/4 of a bar of the Fels-Naptha laundry soap with a quart of hot water to make your concentrate. The for the spray you mix 1 tsp per qt of water or 4tsp per gallon. The full bar of soap cost 99 cents at the grocery so I guess you could say the quart of concentrate cost about a quarter and will make about 48 gallons of treatment spray. That is about half a cent per gallon. Pretty good when you figure a spray bottle of insecticidal soap spray at the store costs 4 or 5 dollars. After noticing that the lilly miller insecticidal oil is really just canola oil, I found that canola oil is about 4 times less costly at the grocery store. I got a bit of canola oil for use as needed since I have seen several recipies that call for it or another cooking oil and some directions that use canola oil as the primary ingredient. I found some hard yellow plastic that I cut into rectangles and smeared with organoside to make sticky traps. Not that the organoside is required for such a thing but the cooking oil attracted ants and seemed to loose effectiveness after rain where as the organoside gets very sticky and remain so even when rinsed with water. These sticky traps will probably be more effective if I hang them on sticks above the plants rather than just laying them on the mulch around the garden as they are at the moment. However, when I was testing out some of the sticky trap materials (and discovered the cooking oil spray attracted ants, I smeared the bottom of those bits of plastic with peanut butter mixed with boric acid powder. The ants are definitely attracted to those bates, hopefully they are effective. However the ants that were attracted to the cooking oil are not the ants that are farming the aphids. Has anyone use any of the products that are made of sesame oil, Thyme oil, and clove oil? I have used Organoside before which is sesame oil and fish oil. It is effective but rather unplesant to have everywhere around the garden and I don't want to spray on any plants once fruit starts to develop since it doesn't wash off the fruit very well. I'm just wondering if the stuff made with the sesame, Thyme and clove is less unplesant and therefore more appropriate for eddible plants? I did also get some neem oil to use if the pests persist against the less powerful methods.

I should have been more clear and not said "ate". They shriveled them up and turned them to mush. I could see the aphids, so I knew it was them. We do have slugs too, but I try to keep those at bay and they were not a problem with the kale or cabbage. I brought in a load of compost in October and they were planted directly in to that mixed with some sand/topsoil that we already had. My entire garden is black with compost, so I think (I hope?) I'm good there. I have been thinking of going out and planting some test peas (aphids got those late last winter) in another bed and seeing what happens. Thanks for your reply!

ants MILK aphids for honeydew.. on the leaves.. not in the soil ... [and actually.. they sweat it.. and the ants eat it .. its a sugar source meaning they really dont have little milking stools..e tc.. lol] the words used also also include herding ... i am sure.. you probably also saw farming them.. but no.. they dont plant them in the ground... lol in fact.. ants.. are how i usually find aphid infested plants ... when i notice a plethora of marchers going up and down plants ... if you disturb an any colony ... and presuming you dont have any of the southern bad ants... they will be gone in hours... and you move on with life... when i run across this.. i just do a little more disturbing.. and come back in a day or two.. and finish whatever i was trying to accomplish ... its not really a situation.. where i feel i need to eradicate them ... [unless they are coming in the house.. then its all out warfare ....] ken

Hi Sammy, I don't have the wooley aphids here so can't help you there, or with the asian lady beetles that follow them. However, I have had to deal with fire ants since the early to mid-1980s, so I am pretty experienced in dealing with them. Fire ants do not pose much of a threat to the average person. Their stings hurt...they do burn like fire for a brief period. You get raised-up pustules at the site of each bite, but they don't especially itch or hurt and they go away after a few days. The people who have bad reactions to fire ants have those reactions because they are allergic to the fire ant bites. A fire ant allergy can express itself in several ways, and I am basing this on various people I know who have had severe reactions. In some people, a fire ant allergy causes huge hives and these hives hurt them much more than the typical little pustule hurts a non-allergic person. Whereas most people get the little pustules, some highly allergic people get big purplish swellings that are about the color of the skin of a purple plum and look like a marble underneath your skin. One of our son's childhood friends had this kind of reaction back in the years when they were in elementary school in the early 1990s. He had lots of other allergies and saw an allergist regularly, but I never could tell that his allergic reactions decreased in frequency or intensity. Other people have intense pain that doesn't fade quickly, itching, abnormal swelling that may include the whole leg or arm which was bitten, dizziness, heart palpitations, and even sometimes they have trouble breathing. In other words, some of them go into anaphylactic shock just like people do when they are severely allergic to bee stings. If getting bitten by fire ants causes this reaction in a person, they should seek medical treatment immediately. I keep liquid Benadryl on hand at all times because it begins working very quickly to counter the effects of an insect sting/bite that is causing a severe reaction. None of us in our family are strongly allergic to fire ants, but remember that allergic reactions tend to develop after repeated exposure so you can't assume just because you've never strongly reacted before that you won't react this time. Also, you can obtain quick relief from fire ant bites by mixing baking soda and water to form a paste and plastering that paste over each bite. That is what the Poison Control Center told me to do when Chris stepped in a fire ant mound when he was 13 months old and was outside at grandma and grandpa's house splashing in puddles after a big thunderstorm. It worked for him then--he had several dozen bites on him as did his grandpa who rescued him from the mound--and we've used it ever since. I also gave him liquid Benadryl at the direction of the Poison Control Center and, between the Benadryl and the baking soda paste, he didn't even get very many of those little pustules in comparison to how many ants we knocked off his little legs and feet. For fire ants in your vegetable and fruit growing areas, you can treat the ground with an organic fire ant killer that has spinosad as the active ingredient. I have used this kind of fire ant killer in my veggie garden for several years and it is pretty effective. In areas where you are not growing edible crops, there are several very effective fire ant products you can use that are chemically based. If you prefer to remain organic, I use one called "Come and Get It" (made by Fertilome) that is very effective, but it is hard to find. You may have to order it online if you don't have a full-line nursery near you that carries a lot of organic products. We also have used a chemical product (NOT near the house, veggie garden or fruit trees, but in areas further away from all of them) called "Over and Out" that was very effective and seemed to have a longer residual effect that any other product we'd tried. Based on my 25 years or so experience with fire ants, I'd say that the Texas Two Step Method is definitely the most effective way to control fire ants, to the extent that they can be controlled at all. You can read about the Texas Two-Step method below and you can do the organic version or the chemical version. Over the long term, improving your soil lessens the amount of fire ants you'll have. However, some years when their populations are heavy, I have just as many in the areas where the soil has been heavily improved as I do in poor soil. Here is a link that might be useful: Texas A&M Fire Ant Website