I didn't have a winter garden this year, but in past years, I noticed that all the aphids were gone a couple days after I spotted the first lady beetle. The ladybeetle larvae are the voracious eaters, however.
I also learned that if I wanted to eat broccoli in early spring, I had to use row cover to minimize the aphid populations.
On kale, usually the aphids congregated on 1 or 2 plants, not every one, so I used those as sacrificial plants to cultivate "food" for garden predators. I wanted the lady beetles to stay all season, and I wanted to lure them in with a good food supply. I also realized I liked the flatter kales better than the curly kales, because there were fewer places for aphids to hide and it was easier to wash the leaves!
Sometimes the aphids have already been parasitized by beneficial wasps (the really tiny ones). With a magnifying glass, the parasitized "aphid mummies" look like ballooned aphids, with a hole in one end if the wasp has already hatched and eaten its way out. Those aphids stay!
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