VEGETABLE PATIO GARDEN

Each morning I go out to my back patio to check on my vegetable plants. It had been a long time since I made an attempt to plant a vegetable garden. In May of this year, I decided to try my hand at growing a patio vegetable garden. Mine consists of several buckets of various sizes set out on the brick patio. One has a wire trellis for the cucumbers (small cucumbers are already maturing) to grow upon. One has a stake to hold up the yellow pepper plant (which has already yielded 2 peppers). The other planters contain okra, green onion, parsley, and mint plants. All are really doing great. The okra has started to produce small okra pods and I've harvested the green onions twice thus far. The parsley and mint are used whenever I need these herbs in food dishes.
Each afternoon around 4:30 I am out there watering the thirsty plants. As it's been really dry lately...they need water every day.
I would probably try squash, zucchini, eggplants, and tomatoes if I could convince my husband that it would really be great to have one-third of our patio filled up with more buckets. I had a hard time convincing him that the few I have would be worth the effort. For now, I'm content to care for the few I have.
We have a friend that grows a large garden a few miles from our house. He is so generous! We pick cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, squash, and zucchini from his garden anytime we need some. So why do I want to bother with a garden? Because I enjoy seeing things grow and it's challenging to grow a vegetable patio garden.
When my children were very small, my father-in-law had a truck farm...which was a huge vegetable garden. I would help him hoe, plant, water, and harvest the vegetables. My children grew up with fresh vegetables from that garden. They have very fond memories of digging for potatoes; picking carrots, washing them and eating them "on the spot"; eating green snap beans from the vines; coming into the house with a head of lettuce and halving it between the two of them; and running up and down the rows and rows of fresh vegetable plants.
Yes, growing a garden is hard work and demands a bit of your time, but the rewards are many for those who are not afraid to work and you reap a good harvest in the end.