Guam gardening

Since we moved to Guam 6 months ago, I have settled on doing a container garden over a raised bed garden. This decision was primarily made due to the high cost of filling a raised bed with soil as opposed to being able to spread that cost out by just filling pots with soil as I get the money to do so.

So far I have a Roma tomato, 2 admiral bell peppers, 2 okra, 2 rosemary, dill, basil, container corn and a bush bean variety planted. I also just started some cucumbers from seeds but they haven't come up yet. It is my hopes that I will be able to offset the high cost of fresh produce with this small garden  and also be able to obtain food that I know was not grown with the use of pesticides or other harmful components.

I also constructed a compost bin out of old pallets that were given to me by a store next to our house. This has been huge in cutting the cost of bagged soil for filling my pots. All of my plants are grown in a 50/50 mix of compost and organic potting mix made by black gold. So far I have had to use granular organic fertilizer due to the large amount of rain we receive here. The rain tends to deplete the nutrients in the soil very quickly. I have been adding about 3 tbs of fertilizer every 2 weeks and it has made a little difference in the size of the bell peppers that I am harvesting.