With the great weather - plentiful rain & sunshine - in Hawaii, and with the situation with gasoline, rising costs of groceries, etc., I recently decided to start a vegetable garden. I’m busy, don’t have lots of time to tend to a garden, and frankly never really got into it, so after learning about “container gardens,” I was game for it.
And boy, oh boy, am I amazed. In less than a month, I’m seeing the beginnings of cucumbers, tomatoes, squash and eggplants. Take a look! (Following this video clip, I describe the progress in still photos, below).

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The weekend of July 4, 2008, I stopped by Rosette’s Nursery in Hawaiian Paradise Park, and picked up an armful of miniature pots, seedlings, and a big bag of soil to start my container garden project. Too lazy to dig up a huge plot of land, the “container garden” idea seemed smart to me. I lined up some old wood boards atop a few makeshift stands (5 gallon containers, blocks of wood, whatever I could grab), and made a long counter that stood about 2.5′ high. That was the beginning.


This rinky-dink looking collection of potted vegetable plants was my start.

I’ve been on a schedule of daily watering, and fertilizer once a week. I’m using an organic fertilizer (at my roommate’s insistance - he was with me when I bought the stuff); the fertilizer smells like fresh vegetables, especially when you spray it onto the plants. And the plants LOVE it.
By the 2nd week, the miracle of nature was rapidly doing its thing. The 3 images that follow were shot 2 weeks after the first planting.

Jump forward another week, it is July 21, and while watering the kids this evening, my eye caught what looked like a mini pickle - no, its a CUCUMBER! At closer inspection, I found that the cucumber plant has begun growing vegetables! Over the past week, it started blooming little yellow flowers (as have the squash, eggplants and tomatoes), but the cucumber is the first to actually start looking like vegetables!



The last image is a shot of the lettuce - far cry from the rice grain-size seed I dropped into an old styrofoam box 3 weeks ago.