Tedious gardening post

Our plan to grow vegetables this year has had a certain measure of success so far, though we've learned a lot already about what not to do next time. All the seeds we originally planted in our outside plot seem to have perished; all that grew seemed to be weeds. However, in the greenhouse, the tomato seeds we planted all came up, and I potted them out once they got too big for their tray. Last weekend, O and I dug over the plot again, and planted out all thirty tomato plants, which are now quite big, and some of which are starting to flower. Our garlic in the greenhouse initially seemed to do well, with all the cloves putting up green shoots, but have made no further progress; most of the shoots seem to have died now. Perhaps the soil was too rich, or I watered them too much and they rotted in the earth. I'm not sure. We also bought a little chili plant from a stand outside a house on our road for 50p, and it's flourishing. We also got two small red pepper plants, a courgette and an aubergine plant, which are still in the greenhouse; all these have been repotted and have grown a lot. The courgette is growing yellow flowers and small fruits; the aubergine has grown one large flower so far. However, aphids seem to have formed colonies on some of the greenhouse plants. We wondered about spraying them with a dilute washing-up liquid mixture, as recommended online (to suffocate the aphids since they breathe through their skin) but then I saw a large ladybird on one of the plants, which I reckoned must be eating the aphids, since they seemed no more numerous than a few days earlier. So for the moment I'll leave the ladybirds to it, since the aphids don't seem to be harming the plants in any obvious way.