What is the greenery in the first picture? If it is fast growing shrub you just need to invest in a wood chipper. Let the shrub get to a desired height and thickness then trim and mulch. Then just repeat. In your climate those shrubs would grow all 12 months.

I do have two sieves, for bigger and smaller stones. That's how I made some soil for the concrete planter. Tea spoons were just my joke, sorry :-) The soil you see with large stones is useless even if sifted. I prefer dark, rich soil. I pour poor soil at the bottom of the holes or planters. Will consider getting chickens, and perhaps goats.

J.D. Shredders are my favourite subject, but.... since electricity is expensive here I stay away from everything electric or even gas powered. And I do not control my grass with chemicals. So everything is done by hand and I am looking for ways to import an antique or modern hand-powered shredder. To shred grass, wood. It's a pity they don't make hand powered ones anymore. My grandparents had such old machine. They used to shred grass for animals with it. It was hand powered and I think also electric powered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrtMnbgNFdE

Well, at least it's possible to get soil. The difference between poor soil and good soil is usually organic matter. If I understood you correctly, you had truckloads of seaweed delivered. What happened to that? Seaweed is mostly water, but it's loaded with good stuff. You won't need a shredder to compost that.

DitD, three medium sized trucks full of seaweed. They are being used as soil cover, fertilizer, cover for compost vessels and most are just lying there and waiting to become compost or to become used later. Next time I will get 10 or 20 trucks of this seaweed since they are free, all I pay is gasoline for the truck and labour for the driver.

Now I looked at my question and my original idea was not only just the question, but to begin a conversation looking for other people on other islands to share ideas and even photos with.

Seems to me you need a bed of rock-free soil, and then just dig in or mulch with seaweed. It'll in situ compost readily, and the salt will leach readily as well. I think the electricity and gas you're looking at is for a powered soil sieve, with a backhoe to drop rocky soil into it. You have the right ingredients, but it'll take some work.

J.D. the greenery in the first picture is Pittosporum undulatum. I was told citrus growing next to it does not grow much. It is a show stopper for other plants with lots of toxic oils in it, very easy to burn even while freshly cut. They have built a factory on the island to make fire brickets from it.

You live in a somewhat unique position compared to the rest of the world. I both envy you and feel for you as the challenges you face compared to 99.99% of the world are going to need a unique approach.

We have some volcanic flows here, but most of the area is sedimentary from really old volcanoes.

If you can't get a shredder, look into "hugelkultur" ... basically you bury the tree limbs and trunks to slowly rot and retain moisture.

Or try this:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Quick-made-hand-cranked-compost-shredder/ 

Are you composting paper and cardboard?

good suggestions by Lazy, you make piles of OM and they will eventually become your beds. You also produce some 250-300 lbs of manure per year, a hole in the gravel with some paper at the bottom will turn that, too, into soil eventually.

so when you screen your soil...what is the size you screen out?

you don't have no soil... you are showing pictures of growth and trees... what you call soil and what the plants are growing in just can't be compatible, based on what you've had to say.

Ever hear of this stuff called perlite? You can grow plants in it and nothing else...but it's nothing but expanded lava rock. Which gets back to managing water.

Funny how what most people would consider paradise, once you get there...you find something you take for granted elsewhere is incredibly difficult.

go visit the container forum...look up the infamous 5-1-1 mix...you'd not call it soil at all. but it's close to what you have.

what kind of university with an agriculture program is closest to you, or in the same jurisdiction? Or a climate similar? what I'm trying to get at is growing conditions, methodologies, and technologies that might be most closely applicable to you.

LG: Yes, I compost everything, even toilet paper roll centers, correspondence, but not having any shredders or chaff cutters is hard and thus I am now looking to buy people-friendly one, probably from India, if shipping cost will not kill he deal as I found they sell overthere for as low as $60 per machine. So I may buy 2 or 3 for parts and maybe even sell one to a friend.

Regarding composting. I was reading about and considering once my septic tank is full, due to difficult access to it with a truck I may have to carry the stuff out by a bucket and..... just dump it into my compost piles, or dig holes and bury the sewer contents under ground for 3 to 5 years and then after 3-5 years it may turn into soil. My sewage does not contain chemicals except tiny counts of shampoo and soap. I do not use chemicals to control vegetation. So it's been 3 years since anyone has dumped junk, chemicals etc. here on this ground. I clean and pick up every smallest piece of trash and even dug up some areas and removed most of the buried trash from there.

Things I don't compost are nut shells, hard cardboard, some clothes, anything that will take longer than 3 years I will not compost, since I don't have a shredder, a chopper or a cutter.

I may try the suggested kugelkultur, which is very interesting.

So, with everyone's suggestions I will be making lots of soil soon, especially if I am able to import some small equipment or even a larger piece of used wood chipper.

It would be nice if every island had a huge wood chipper, shredder etc. for public to use for a certain fee. Since the islands are remote (1700 km from Lisbon, 1600 km from Morocco and 3900 km from US coast), it's expensive to import anything.

Wayne, I screen by hand with small screeners that I bought and another one that I made myself. They screen to about 1-2 mm and another one maybe 0.5 cm to 1 cm stones or soil.

I have perlite that I imported and am using it for potted plants as you can see in one of my photos. I made my own soil mix from purchased bagged soil, sphagnum moss, perlite, sand and some screened local soil. Takes a very long time (whole day) to fill 10 smaller pots this way.

I did purchase some soil as I mentioned earlier in my posts. One soil I puchased 10 trucks of is (to my opinion) a CLAY-LOAM and another one is just crushed volcanic rock. Those two mixed together already will be a better soil. Yet with back pain that I have etc. and no equipment is going to take some time, but I will never be able to fill one hectare with good soil unless I spend a fortune on it. No complaints, it is exciting, I like the challenge.

Just purchased an old truck for over a grand, unfortunately too small of a trunk (Toyota Hilux 1983 with 2 rows of seats) and it is not a 4x4 :-) Nothing else was available on this island. All my money is gone on those home improvements. Now the hard work begins to improve the garden.

Thanks for the suggestion of 5-1-1 mix.

Regarding University.... the closest one is about 2000 km away by airplane, probably a 3 hour flight, and it's not cheap. :-) But we do have internet here :-)

My University will be online, GardenWeb, DG etc. I hope others learn from our discussions as well.

Did I mention, one can decently survive here on $400-$500 a month (if you own your own place). That would include electricity (no heating except one room), water, gas, phone, internet, 60 TV channels, food and not much anything else. No property tax here and if you make that little, no any other taxes either. Soil is extra.

As I've suggested, and you confirmed, you've got LOADS of compostables in the form of seaweed. You don't need a shredder for that. Why bother with paper, cardboard, clothes, or local trash? So, what's the issue?

But thank you for posting this question. It's a novel one, and really gets us thinking.

Dan, why bother composting everything? I enjoy it only thinking I am not adding much to the trash. When I lived in a place with plenty of rich soil, I was still composting and recycling everything.

Here I am buying 10 litres of black soil (bagged, probably not a sludge, as it does not smell anything like a sludge, it has sand in it) for $1 (€0.99). Only one store has this price. Other stores sell the same volume for $3. Is $1 per 10 litres of soil still expensive? Probably still is.

I also recycle egg shells and egg holders, even those if I spot in the trash thrown out by others. It's free compost material.

I'll use seaweed as well. I was unsure as I thought seaweed alone is too strong of a mix, but when I dumped seaweed around some bananas, only one banana grow s flower the one where most seaweed was dumped. The rest, after 1,5 years, no signs of flowers, so now I am going to dump seaweed all around all of my banana "trees".

I won't remove the pine bark mulch from around the bananas, or should I? I had 24 pine bark bags around 14 banana trees for weed control. The soil I used for bananas is crushed volcanic rock mainly that I purchased 3 small trucks of.

And you know why I need a one hectare field? For some variety fruit trees, such as avocado, orange, cherimoya, araçal, figs, tangerines, pineapples, maybe even coconuts, own consumption and my palm tree garden. Pineapples will grow better and bigger here if I grow them in a cold frame. I want to plant as many different (tropical) palms that will grow here as possible, So it becomes a mini botanical garden. Some palms that need lots of tropical heat will not grow here (well).

What do you think of carpenter's wood shavings? Thin layer of wood shavings in the compost every 4 inches or so?

OK, I was thinking you were composting trash because you didn't have anything else to compost. But wholesale recycling is certainly a good thing. The C:N ratio of seaweed is similar to cow manure. But it's going to require more than "dumping" seaweed. Like for any compost pile, you need to stir occasionally. In fact, adding seaweed to any high carbon compostable, like dried leaves, wood shavings, paper, or cardboard, will work especially well. Once you really have compost, and mix it with some screened soil, you'll have a marvelous bedding mix.

If I were you, I wouldn't use seaweed as a mulch, which it sounds like you're doing with bananas. You'll introduce a lot of salinity into the soil that way. Bananas are intolerant of salt spray and soil salinity. But regularly irrigated, and once composted, the seaweed will probably be well leached of salt.

Seaweed is widely used as mulch in coastal and island communities. If it is put on the land in the Autumn rain will wash out the salt by Spring. In the Channel Islands it was a valued resource.

Regarding seaweed I waited several months at least until the stinky seaweed was well seasoned by the rain etc. at the town and I believe it became relieved of most of its salt and only then I got my 3 truckloads from there. I was going to get another 10 trucks but it was already gone. Someone must have waited for it to get the salt out as well. Now I see people picking it up by buckets of what's left. Now why we are lucky with the easy-to-get seaweed is because the town has built a quay and it blocked ocean current, which started bringing seaweed into the little bay where boats are loaded into the ocean from and it creates a very foul odour in the town. So the govt. gets their excavator and takes the sea weed away as much as they can and it's all free to take. Next time they got the stink problem I will get the new seaweed as well and just wait for a year for it to lose its salt into my porous stoney ground before I begin using it. Life is much more fun with challenges than without them.

Now was it a coincidence that my bananas grown on a very poor soil got its flower after I dumped seaweed around them. The soils is like a volcanic gravel with lots of stones that are size of 3 cm. So one put of the 14 banana "trees" must have been tricked by the seaweed around it. Elsewhere on the island bananas grow with no problem, but they are not as large as the real tropical ones, yet tastier, and I am a bit higher in elevation at around 150 metres above sea level and tiny bit less sunshine on the north side of the volcano slope.

I lived in Brazil for 8 months, and I have seen many trees, including mango and banana, seemingly growing out of rock. So go ahead, they will find their way through those pebbles and into the seams of soil underneath. Once there, they will catch those falling nutrients from organic matter at the surface.

It is the root vegetables that will give you trouble. Solution: grow things underground only in specialized beds, and substitute where possible. Example: winter squash in lieu of sweet potato.

I don't think winter squash are particularly going to like growing in a bed of rocks. But if you make it happen, please let us know!

If I weren't afraid they would take over the island, I'd send you come mesquite seeds. They are happily colonizing our most recent lava flow.

The "problem" is I am not a vegetable grower (yet). I do have one mango planted and another one is waiting, but am stressed by only a single thought how much work it takes to bust the rock up, sometimes with a pneumatic hammer... the rest you know.... and sometimes I need to hire a huge machine called "martelo" which costs $80 to $110 an hour even that labor rates here worker or specialist are the same about $6 to $10 an hour even if electrician or plumber, roofer or laborer, is the same rate.

What would I do with a mesquite tree, that I never saw one in my life. Does it have big sharp needles and grow in a dry climate? Well, Azores are very humid and so +18C or 64F is the most comfortable temperature here, not 68F and not 75F or 80F but 64F.

Actually I like all trees with beautiful bark. I am growing a rainbow euc here in a pot.

Talking about mosquitos (not mesquite), I am surprised there are very few of those here and only in summer just one per night and they are very weak and easy to scare away. No snakes, no predators either and I doubt the spiders are poisonous. So, pack your bags and increase the population :-)

LG are you in NM? Or is it Hawaii that you are at? I have never been to either places.

My reason for suggesting the 5-1-1 mix was to get you thinking about the definition of soil. What you screen out...is what the 5-1-1 is made of.

If i had limited access to "dirt" i'm pretty certain i'd be willing to accept larger size material into a soil mix. Actually, i know it...because i buy lava rock to put into my container soil mixes. For really small pots, i use a 1/2" screen, for larger houseplants a 3/4" or 1" screen, and for some of my outdoor pots, i don't bother to screen at all.

My reason for suggesting universities was to get directly to people who know this stuff as close to your conditions as you can get. I had no doubt it wasn't as easy as a cab ride...but this internet thing makes the entire world as far away as as a google search and a couple of clicks.

I'd suggest some light reading (ahem). Very very very few books written about soil svience are light reads. My go to soil reference is Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils by Brady and Weil. I'm sure your local used bookstore either has a copy or can recommend suitable substitutes...or that internet thing.

It's also possible that university has an agriculture department or horticulture program. These would be the people to start talking to.

The more i twist this one around...and given that my days are currently spent watching large volumes of sap become small volumes of syrup via literally watching it boil, i have lots of time for idle speculation...the more i ponder this, the more i think your answer is management of water and fertility. Give me that pile of rubble you screen out of your soil and i can grow plants in that. Mix that rubble with organic material, dust, sawdust, whatever you can find...your volumes increase quickly. But you have to manage water and fertility, mostly water.

Why don't you consider to build raised beds/pots with those rocks as a wall instead of trying to dig a hole?

Do you have coffee shops or restaurants or cafe there? Bring them your bucket , talk to a manager for his permission to fill that bucket with used coffee grounds, tea bugs for you and pick this bucket every evening.

What about all those leaves in the forest? Do they ever fall? Why can't you rake them?

You mentioned that there are weeds existing, how they are able to grow?

You said that you have slopes on your property that is great! build retaining wall from rocks without mortar, fill it with dropped leaves, coffee, newspaper, sand, clay, etc and you can plant your trees in these "pockets". At least I would do that, and I did it on my property, where was no normal dirt at all, but millions rocks, brick-like clay, and forest around.

If I understand correctly, the problem is not supplying organic matter to the soil. As noted, the OP has truckloads of seaweed available. You won't get truckloads of organics from coffee shops or restaurants. You won't get truckloads of leaves, and if you did, you'd need to shred them. The problem is having soil at all. So the issue is getting rid of the rocks, and that's pretty simply an exercise in screening. The problem here is mainly how to screen very large quantities of material.

One idea might be to harvest beach sand. That's pre-screened mineral material. Let it get leached of salt, and then mix with similarly leached, and ideally composted seaweed. Have you considered that strategy? You've got tons of both. That should make for a reasonably nice textured mix. Now, that won't contain the fines that normal soil has, and as a result might have some mineral nutrient deficiencies. But it's a start. Sand is usually a no-no, as sand mixed with clay makes concrete. But you don't even have clay!

Thanks for many great suggestions. Yet my problem is I write too much and the stuff I write gets covered with more stuff I write and it's probably too time consuming to read it all that I wrote, so I always try to be brief and I end up writing an entire page.

What I mean is that I wrote in my earlier posts that beach sand is as easy to get here as gold. Government buys white sand thousands of miles away would be my guess for their artificial tiny sand beaches.

I do have clay, lots of it, as I wrote in my earlier posts, but it's 10 truckloads of clay-loam (to my opinion), which I wrote about earlier in my long posts. That soil has clay but I can not make a sausage from it, it is both clayish and crumblish, so it must be CLAY-LOAM instead of CLAY or it may be LOAM-CLAY. I will be mixing it with other materials and now the seaweed too. I'll take photos of all that and post here although I am not sure, do you want to see photos?

Regarding raised beds, again, the reality of the islands, is wind. The high we plant the more exposure to the damaging wind. Thus people plant in deep holes or build up stone walls to protect from wind. Instead of raised beds, dig the yard 1-2 m below and then dump soil in there, to protect from wind. Lots of wind, although sometimes we may get 3 weeks no wind in summer, but then it catches up.

This is what I was trying to explain all the time, we are different! :-) Wind lots, no beach sand, etc.

The seaweed I have actually contains quite some sand on it.... and so on.

Let say you have desired soil on your property and plant all your trees. How they are going to fight winds? Are you planning to build "Chinese Wall" around them? At least you have enough rocks for that :)))

Whoa, tropical island marketed as a beach destination for tourists, and they import sand? But yes, this has been already covered in this thread. My apologies.

But clay mixed with seaweed ought to do pretty well.

As to wind, palm trees including banana palm, deal with wind just fine. Of course, if you're trying to compost with leaves, and even shredded leaves, wind will be a serious complication.

Yes, here is a constant battle: lack of soil, wind and so on. They grow vines for wine on Pico by building low standing black lava stone walls called "paredes" or "murinhos" without cement, to warm the plants and protect from wind. That's why I was explaining how they do it here, they plant in as deep "valleys" as possible or dig deep "holes" as fields and plant "down there" for the lack of better words. I was told repeatedly by locals to ignore sun and pay attention to wind more than sun exposure. So this is "hell" in a "paradise".

Never give your rocks away is a good idea. If there is excess of rocks, we/they build pyramids from them, for future use or for beauty. Sometimes it's just a nice stone mound, some lok like small pyramids. I'm gonna do it too.

Haha, yes, white sand on Faial island in Horta beach? I don't think it came from the bottom of the ocean. Or perhaps it was, but the local ocean bottom sand is usually grey or black. Ask real locals :-) Most "beaches" here are just stone pools, very beautiful indeed. I don't care lying down in a sand, I like rough nature. These islands are not for the weak, it is scary at times with volcano making sounds and i live in a slope of it where my house stands on huge lava flows and tunnels. If lava flows again I will be homeless or worse. but that's part of the fun!

You sure clay + seaweed = love?

How about throwing wood shavings into compost? They got some saw dust but mostly shavings.

I built a two section compost home. I haven't started using it yet, still recovering from back pain, which I was trying not to talk about :-)

It's going to be fun when the thing gets going again.

I am known for screwing everything up from car purchase to planting and growing etc. Nothing works :-) But when it does, I feel rewarded.

Why not tell everyone what you are doing with your garden on a rmeote island or even elsewhere? Post pictures? I will post more later.

Pay attention to the black stone walls. This is how they grow vine-wine on Pico. Used to be entire island full of those: https://i0.wp.com/epicureandculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/pico_wine_view.jpg

My land is full of the stone walls too, but it is all now overgrown with forest for the past 100-200- years. It's beautiful although when I arrived about 3 years ago it looked scary to me and there are things really scary about the place such as sounds and sights that you grow to ignore.

I'm in central New Mexico. Lots of wind, volcanic cones, old calderas, recent (5,000 years old) lava flows, and crappy soil. But at least I have sand!

Those vineyards look familiar. Here's the nearby Zuni Indian tribes traditional gardens - called "waffle gardens" - in an area with high winds and little water. The stone walls block the wind and trap snow and blown dirt. The planting beds are sunk into the plots a foot or so to decrease the wind even more. It's sunken square foot gardening.

Mesquite trees (Prosopis species) grow in Hawaii very well - they are legumes with extremely deep strong root systems. If they can find a crack in the rock they can get a root into it and start cracking it. Good firewood, good "biomass" for composting because of the beans, and all parts are edible. But it's invasive!

Wow, very similar vineyards. They seem to have larger sections.

Mesquite not good for humid climate. I don't like invasive. Acacia here is invasive and Incenso (Pittosporum) etc. I like ARAÇAL fruit trees, orig. from Brazil. Grows well here and fruits are the tastiest in the word. They plant themselves wherever they like and I let them grow there. The "best" gardening is probably when you just let it slide and remove the unwanted plants and trees. Then you get closest to natural garden.

Post more photos. You have lots of sand, that is good. "We" do have oceanic black sand for sale (they sell, I buy, when i have money) at about $30 per cubic meter, plus delivery. The grey-black sand it probably comes from volcanic rock erosion. It includes small shells!

They say other island in Azores have more and better soils.

I used to buy soil and sand in the U.S. I think it cost about $150 to $300 per truck of soil or sand. I also bought (wrong) "pine fines" huge truck for $900. It wasn't so "fines" including some half foot longs. Not easy to find good pine fines even in the U.S. Like the ones in the 5-1-1 video.

When you have entire continent land mass easier for you and Pico is only 9 x 29 miles in the widest/longest places and lots of shortcomings (deficit).

I have to assume that's how they find soil for their vineyards. By piling up all the big rocks? That's an often-used strategy. Huge amount of work.

Vines probably grow on whatever is there and they are not picky, I suppose.

Pico, I shall make you envy me ... look at ALL MY DIRT! (the picture is of a plumbing repair trench).

I have so much dirt that my house is built from it!

Will they let you use dynamite to make holes in the rock?

What the...? Is this good or bad? What kind of soil is that? You used dynamite?

Is it ok to use dynamite on volcano?

They have a huge stone quarry on the slope of Pico volcano. I hope they know what they are doing.

"PicoAzores

They have a huge stone quarry on the slope of Pico volcano. I hope they know what they are doing."

But you said that universities are too far..... you can't be sure about what they know.

It was a joke, августа. I meant to say I hope they don't dig a hole deep enough for lava to surface. I hope you already graduated yours.

Pico - I live in the Rio Grande Valley. In some places it is hundreds of feet deep in the sediment that has eroded off the Rocky Mountains and out of the old calderas - gravel, sand, and clay closer to the river.

That trench is in a silt-loaded sand that is common as a top layer in some places. I know from the soil surveys that it's 50-100 feet deep.

Houses made of mud brick are common. They also fall apart if you don't keep them dry.

What we are short on is organic material. I have almost nothig you could call "loam".

What do you think of carpenter's wood shavings? Thin layer of wood shavings in the compost every 4 inches or so?

YES!!!!! As much as you can scavenge.

My compost is about 1/2 pine or juniper sawdust and half weeds and leaves and kitchen scraps. We use locally made pellet fuel as cat litter - the pellets fall apart into sawdust when they get wet - and the urine-soaked sawdust (minus the feces) goes in the bins, layered with whatever I have available.

It makes a coarse compost that doesn't vanish in the dirt as quickly as the finer stuff, which is what I want.

"It would be nice if every island had a huge wood chipper, shredder etc. for public to use for a certain fee."

Excellent idea: Suggest it to the island government as a way to minimize trash and help the people trying to grow things.

Or find several other people who would have a use for it to share the cost.

Gardening with weeds is hard enough, and rocks...imagine having to deal with lava in the garden. :-P

If there is adequate organic matter available, but there are more rocks than soil, I begin to think crushed rock (<1/4" ?) mixed with compost may be a way. I guess it depends on the type of rock, because chemical reactions over eons turn rock into soil, and your type of rocks may not make for good soil chemistry if ground up all at once. It's also not that easy to have your own rock crusher, even if you wanted to have electric or gas powered machines.

"PicoAzores

It was a joke, августа. I meant to say I hope they don't dig a hole deep enough for lava to surface. I hope you already graduated yours."

It was a joke from my side too, isn't that obvious? :))

Very good suggestions. Lg: mud brick homes do not like flooding, or rain, do they. If you can get a few trucks of stones cheaply, why not build homes from stone? To me the most attractive homes are those built from stone. It just mortar joint does not look good on stone walls. The stones look too much "arrested" by the refined mortar joints around them. The kind of style they use in NC.

I have loads of lava in my garden too. Unfortunately it does not flow anymore, but if I could drill deep into the lava flow... who needs a fireplace. I just drove around the island again, fantastic views and places. It's like 1000 worlds on one small island. Many different towns that have aura & vibe each of its own. Not like other places ijn ze wereld where they use colours ad nauseam. Kicks arse of Greece and of Cape Town.