New alpaca poop

Buckets & buckets of alpaca poop to nourish my compost and gardens! I made a trip today to the corral of co-workers who raise alpacas. It had been a while since I'd been there, and there's an addition of a couple more poop-producing critters since my last visit.

A convenient feature of alpacas & llamas is that they concentrate their poop versus scattering it all over the corral, so it's fairly easy to fill up a few wheelbarrow loads in a short time span. The poop was mixed with a little straw (great addition), and I think was also wetted by the animals' urine. That too is a good additive for the compost-heating process.

To mark the acquisition of fresh manure, I turned the contents of my Earth Machine, and added some new manure mixed with old grass clippings and a bunch of leaves. With the addition of water & time, I should see a pretty good jump in temperature in a few days. I also emptied the contents of my tumbler composter since it was mostly finished, sifted it, and then put it on my rearranged raised beds and the tomato bed. Then I added a bunch of alpaca poop, old grass clippings, leaves, and water and spun it a few times.

Alpaca/llama manure is not extremely high in nitrogen; its carbon/nitrogen ratio is between 15/1 to 25/1. Compare that to poultry and rabbit manure which can have a ratio of 4/1; it's extremely high in N and can really heat up a compost pile when mixed with a bunch of carbon, or brown, items. But my experience both in Wisconsin and here is that it's not as easy to acquire quantities of poultry and rabbit manure, as it is that from larger, hooved animals like horses, cows, and llamas/alpacas. Alpaca/llama manure can also be directly mixed in with garden soil with little concern for harming plants; this practice is not recommended for higher N manures.