The current solution

I ended up spraying down the entire garden with Eight in order to avoid anymore pests chewing away my plants. The pain-in-the-butt part about it is that they only sold Eight in the hose bottle.

As I might have mentioned before, my landlord has a hose near the front of the house, but it doesn't reach all the way to the backyard. Therefore, I still haul my watering can from inside, back and forth. What I ended up having to do for the Eight is to set up the hose and spray the diluted Eight into the water can, then drag that back over to the garden.

The main problem with this method is that I can't "spray" on the underside of the plants. I can try to drench them and splash it up underside the leaves, but overall, there are definitely places for pests to hide. I'm not going to take the effort to put it in a spray bottle and go leaf by leaf.

Anyway, I hope this will hold off any arrival of horned worms also. I still have visions of my mother getting so frustrated that she plucked each worm off at a time and cut off their heads. Until I had a conversation with my dad the other day about it, I was convinced for years that that was the only way you could kill them. Ha-ha.

I also picked up some Garden Safe, an organic pesticide, to spray down my basil with. It's generally not a great idea to use pesticides on herbs, since the leaves are the part that we consume. However, the woman at the garden center assured me that it would be safe. I'll just have to scrub everything down really well before I use it.