Aloha Susan, As you can probably tell by my name, I'm from Hawaii, now living in Kansas. Why not grow some Manoa lettuce? You'll have to give it some partial shade so I'd get a potted palm and grow the lettuce beneath it in another pot. Nice filtered shade is provided by the palm. Also, yard long beans would work. Lots of local gardeners grow yard long beans. They are excellent producers, but the vine is quite aggressive. I've never grown yard longs in a pot, but I'm guessing a few seeds would work. You'll have to give it a trellis. They love heat. Also, check with local nurseries for a tomato that grows locally. I'm afraid peas are out of the question. You need cool weather for them. If you were living in Kula on Maui, you could grow peas, but otherwise you're wasting your time. Sugar snap peas grow on the Big Island in the cooler areas too. Your best plan is to go to a local nursery and see what is offered there in the way of locally developed veggies. Some of the Chinese cabbages might work too. Hope this helps, einei, but you gotta forget about peas. Too hot, eh?

I've been creating 2 native "meadow gardens" in a wild area in the back 1/2 acre of my yard. This area was colonized by lots of invasive plants such as Oriental bittersweet, Buckthorn, shrub Honeysuckle, etc, some of which were quite large. I cut the larger shrubbery/small trees, but wasn't sure what to do with all the leftover stumps and zillions of seedlings and weeds. I considered tilling, hand digging, etc. but sheet composting seemed to be the easiest way to create a garden under these conditions (maybe most all conditions). All summer, I collected bags of grass clippings at the town compost site, along with extra paper leaf bags. I would tear open and spread the paper bags, right on top of the weedy stuff (mowed or not), then spread 2-3 inches of grass clippings on top. As this decayed, I added more clippings or leaves or whatever, right on top. This has worked well so far. Grass clippings are particularly well-suited for this purpose. When they get wet, they congeal together, to form a nice thick mat that is very difficult for weeds to penetrate, even after the paper breaks down. This thick layer also deprives the stumps of light, which prevents them from resprouting, without the need to use herbicides (I hope). A note: fresh grass clippings stink pretty bad until they dry out! So far I've covered approx. 500-600 SF between the two gardens. Cost: $0 (except if you count gas required to drive 4 miles each way to compost site). These gardens will easily be 1000 SF or more when finished, probably a 3rd garden added. I started planting this summer but expect by next Spring, I'll be able to dig holes and plop seedlings much more easily. Here's a pic of the sheet composting in process - this is a new layer, in the background right are older layers, where I've added leaves/compost on top. You can see how terribly weedy this area is around the edges.

I have a knock out and it's pretty hardy and thorny. Queen Elizabeth is a darn stout thick stalked heavy duty thorn maker but it's more vertical than hedge. I have 3 Chianti's that are considered climbers and I can't get near those suckers. They grow like mad, cover everything and have medium size thorns that grow so closely together you can not touch the stems at all. Kinda like painful velcro. It's a once bloomer though, I don't know if that's a bad in your book.

Whatever you do, just don't plant a mimosa. Anywhere. Ever. As annoying as it may be to sweep up dead leaves and flowers, it's nothing compared to having to squat or kneel on the ground and hand-pull a few hundred seedlings, one at a time, which is what we had to do nearly every day of the year in my childhood home in Sacramento, with three mimosa trees in the front yard (only one of which was really planted intentionally - the others were seedlings that no one quite got around to pulling, and then suddenly they were six feet tall and it seemed like a big decision to pull them at that point, and nobody made the decision, so then they were thirty feet tall). We often had as many as 25 mimosa seedlings per square foot. No tree that does that to a yard should be allowed to continue living. I wouldn't plant anything without first googling the species name accompanied by the word "invasive" to find out whether it's shown invasive tendencies in California (most importantly) or anywhere else (less importantly, but can still be a useful warning sign). I like my plants to provide me with occasional seedlings, but a few babies now and then is not at all the same thing as daily centuplets. Go ahead, put up with a tree that produces some sweepable litter - it'll be worth it if doing that helps you pick a tree that doesn't produce too many seedlings.