Gardening Woes

Something's been eating my organic leafy veggies. I couldn't see what it was at first but eventually found this little wormy thing eating my basil buds. Can you see it? It's on the stem and is what looks like a green worm.

As a new gardener this is my first time encountering these. I looked online and there are basically these moths that lay larvae on your soil and then these little critters come out to eat your greens.

 

Generally they're called cabbage worms, (I think these are cabbage loopers) but they don't just eat your cabbage and broccoli. No...they eat all your leafy greens and basil too! The above picture are my mesclun lettuce. The tiny holes in the leaves are the job of small cabbage worms. They're hard to find when they're that small. Apparently they consume your leaves in a voracious manner because in a few days, I pretty much had no whole leaves to eat...and found some pretty fat worms. Dangnamit!

Now these big suckers eat pretty much the whole leaf and are easy to find! Look how skinny that leaf the worm is attached to is compared to the other leaves. I pulled that leaf right out and tossed it in the bushes away from the home (while wearing gloves of course). There are also some black dots along the leaf...yeah that's the worm's poop. The bigger the poop, the bigger the worm. It's like one day you look outside and there's tons of big black dots in your leaves (not pictured). At first I thought it was some kind tiny egg...but nope...it's just poop.

So that's my problem so far...that and lack of sun which I can't help due to the location for now.