The Potager Garden In Hawaii

All right, I’ve really procrastinated on this potager garden all winter long and things are already turning the corner for spring gardening, at least here in Hawaii. My main problem with starting this new garden was that I had big grandiose plans with beautiful cobbled walk ways, raised stone beds, beautiful arbors and sitting areas and amazing and sustainable plantings. Needless to say I didn’t hit the dirt running, especially here in East Hawaii where there is only lava rock, with no soil this means importing dirt, nutrients, water, mulch and really starting from the ground up.






After clearing out a nice section for my tropical potager, I made some preliminary plans. Take a look an the initial plan I made from literally a piece of lined paper I save from being tossed out. Now this is where things started to fall apart. I realized that all the work I’m planning is very labor intensive and seeing that most of my funds for this potager were being allocated to the plants and trees ( and what true plant fanatic would not spend the money mostly on plants ). Sigh, I agonized about all the work involved and started slowly in the process of making piles of rock. Sorting flat rocks for pavers, squarer rocks for rock walls and odd shaped rocks for filler. It almost seemed like from the endless supply of rocks in the garden, I was just making more piles of rocks…..ugh!



Well it has been a long haul doing most of the work myself, I have been making some small progress and here’s an update on what I have finally created in a small area that will be allocated as the potager.




The foundation to a future garden shed with a stone wall perimeter is being planned. Large rocks in the background will be used for a pond and water feature.


This is the first fruit tree I planted in the potager garden. It is one of my favorite fruits trees called a surinam cherry. It tastes like a little like a cherry and pineapple combined, sweet and tangy with a very large seed and very pretty clusters of small white flowers.


Boy that was hot and exhausting just thinking about all the work involved and I’ve only just begun the adventure…stay tuned for the next chapter of the potager garden in Hawaii.

The Potager Garden in Hawaii Grows...

I've started the process finally...the ground has been broken and I've officially started my quest to build a potager garden on this land. Funny thing is that there's no home yet, no soil, no water, no nutrients, no mulch...just pure lava rock and weeds, trash plants and my determination to build my kitchen garden in East Hawaii. Also the potager style of kitchen garden is not a common garden type here in Hawaii. Even though I've always had a fascination about developing a more formal kitchen garden. I envision this being a hybrid style of formal, meets tropical planting... instead of apple and peach allee's, I'll be doing cherimoya, cacao and papaya arbors and borders. In place of blackberries and strawberries, I'll plant pineapple and poha berries. Fortunately herbs can grow anywhere and I'll be fortunate to be able to harvest year round.

Well outside of dreaming about this garden and starting to push some rocks around, I needed to have a game plan. After mulling over the property on where the potager should be placed, I decided to really make this more formal and plot a design plan of how I want this to look....isn't it funny how things get created on little pieces of paper and that's exactly how i started my garden plan...on a wrinkled, garbage tossed out piece of paper. Well, I actually did a few revisions of this plan, bet here's what it looked like when I decided to do an initial draft.

I know this does seem a little bit more hap-hazard than some of the more elaborate plans I've seen like the top picture of the The King's Gardens at Versailles. Needless to say, I was planning a much more scaled down version to that potager, and it would be my very own Hawaiian kitchen garden.


Well, before I go on into the next phase of my journey, I'll be posting some inspirational sites/videos that I've stumbled across on the web. Here's a YouTube video called The Secret Garden - Nocturne, that i enjoyed seeing and listening to at the same time....enjoy.

How to start a potager garden on pure solid lava rock.

I was planning my potager garden in East Hawaii which I have been dreaming about since I had just ripped a small portion of the property. This parcel is made entirely of pure solid lava rock, with small cracks that grasses, shrubs and trees have rooted themselves successfully and survived...The entire starting process has been slow and I have solely been responsible for moving around the endless supply of rocks. I have initially creating some hardscaping projects like rock walls, rock walkways, rock beds...everything rock, rock, rock (seems like an endless supply), as you can see this is a really daunting project considering there is no soil, or nutrients or mulch but pure lava rock...

Needless to say I needed to take my time, reflect and get inspiration from many resources, gardens, nursery jaunts and online browsing. I found this cool video on YouTube that really put me back in the groove and really get this project jump started.



This will be a series of new projects and updates on the potager garden from start to present.