The first year we had our garden in the side yard, we had the worst cabbage worms I've ever seen. We had just built the first raised bed against the steeply sloped yard, topped off with nearly 6 inches of compost- it was pristine. And, yet, the damage was hardly superficial. It was minor at first, of course, or, at least, I barely noticed the tiny holes along the margins of each leaf until, one day, the heart of every cabbage, kale, and collard suddenly began to squirm with the lime green progeny of Pieris Brassicae. When I arranged to get the first Indian Runner ducklings to eat the caterpillars, I knew next to nothing about keeping livestock. For instance, it's probably impossible to judge the sex of a duckling by the sound of it's quack, although you might find conflicting information regarding this on a few widely-browsed internet sources. That's why, a month after bringing home three presumably female ducklings and naming them after my sisters, I was surprised to end up discovering that I had let three grumpy drakes loose in my garden. There were a couple of other things I learned from this episode too. First, ducks like pretty much the same types of leafy greens that we do and, though we no longer have a desperate problem with cabbage moth caterpillars, we also rarely get kale from the "duck garden" to this day. Although it might seem more of a failure than a success, the dilemma served to teach a fundamental lesson regarding the complexity of the natural systems that we live in the midst of and take for granted all the time. When a younger version of myself discovered duck-oriented pest control methods on the latest permaculture forum, it seemed so clear that this was such a beautifully concise solution to our bug problem. Instead, it was just the very beginning of an endless quest to harmonize more closely with nature that still gives meaning to my life. For instance, while working in the nightshade garden that used to be our front yard, when I see the Tru-Green pesticide and fertilizer truck waft a plume of noxious smoke down over the neighbor's front yard and the whole mountaintop that we live on, at first, I get righteously angry for the sake of our planet but, then, I stop. I remind myself to try and find harmony with nature and be, instead, like the river that erodes the mountain away slowly. I decided that, in the end, it is better to trust in the informative power of community over exclusion and decide to wage the war against Monsanto, persistently, by bringing the neighbors bags of organic tomatoes, bursting with flavor and in all the colors of the sun, for the rest of the season. The greatest failure I've experienced in my garden, from an overall perspective, is in growing New Zealand Spinach. Twice, I've attempted to grow it. Both times plants came up at the corresponding sites and I've eaten them regularly throughout the summer and found them to be somewhat "chalky" and "fibrous." It turns out, both times, the plant I was eating wasn't New Zealand Spinach at all but, instead, was Bidens Fronderosa, a common weed of disturbed soils in our area. Even the greatest failure can be a valuable learning experience.