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.

Vegetable garden rearrangement

Though growing & harvesting seasons are over, the work is not yet! Yesterday & today were spent doing some moving around of the raised beds I've put in place over the last few summers. The shadow cast by the 6'-high fence is visible in the image, and three out of my four beds were in the shaded part of the garden from October through April or so. Cold & usually frozen soil would be the result; in fact, when I started this moving process yesterday I encountered already-frozen soil. Lots of energy was spent moving huge chunks of frozen dirt out into the sun where they will eventually thaw, hopefully before the next round of low temperatures arrive. What was nice to see in all of these big chunks of dirt were dozens of little worm holes; looks like I have a healthy population of worms working on my soil texture & organic matter.

Surprisingly, my compost containers that are in the shade haven't frozen yet. I also started another batch of compost in my Home Composter unit. I doubt that it'll get hot but maybe it'll warm up a little.

Not so fast with the brusselsprouts.....

I'm still able to squeeze a few more brusselsprouts out of my plants - picked probably about a pound or so today. I think the slight purple hue that some of the little sprouts have is due to the frosty temperatures we've had some nights.

We got a great moisture-filled snowfall & rain storm a few days ago - over 1.25" of moisture sank into the dry-as-bone ground. All of the snow still hasn't melted.

Leaves are now off the trees; they were helped by the wet snow. I've raked up most of them & stored them in my several leaf bins, ready to be used for the next compost session!

One winter or late fall task is to move three of my raised beds in the vegetable garden away from the 6'-high-tall privacy fence that separates my garden from the neighbor to the south. The fence keeps those three raised beds snow covered and full of cold or frozen soil into late April & early May, which is too late when I could be planting seeds/lings in them. Moving them means I'll have to rearrange my drip irrigation tubing that spends the summer out in the garden.