Spring gardening with alpaca manure:

 Eggplant, zucchini, squash, and green beans.

Roma tomatoes

tomatoes and green beans

cucumbers

Here is my garden. It took a while to get going as I let the garden get over run by weeds over the fall and winter. What a nightmare to clean! I will never let it get that bad again.

To begin with I have to say that Tommy must have found the poorest dirt around for these plants to survive in. He didn’t do it on purpose because he asked for garden dirt but never bothered to look at what was being brought in. The dirt is partly clay with huge rocks in it. I was surprised to see anything grow in it last year but everything survived and grew wonderfully. I credit the alpaca manure we mixed in.

This year I started planting the garden about 3-4 weeks ago. Each of tomato plants had all their leaves pinched off except for the biggest 3 and planted 2/3 of the plant in the ground. To aid the poor dirt we purchased top soil to plant the young vegetables to give them a good start. As you can see in the pictures they are all happy and growing. However, nothing is growing faster than the zucchini. They are huge plants that have already begun to flower. It won’t take long before I will be harvesting fresh organic zucchini.

I planted a lot of tomatoes as I plan to can this year way more than I did last year. I do have pepper plants not shown above which will be part of my homemade salsa. Yum!

I don’t seem to be having any insect problems at the moment. I am out in the garden almost on a daily basis pulling out grass or small weeds that are appearing. So far I’m winning the battle. My biggest problem at the moment is that I have an armadillo that is digging by the plants and uprooting some of them trying to get to the insects in the dirt. Until Tommy has time to put up a gate to the garden I stuck two lawn chairs in the opening. It is helping some.

Alpaca manure is wonderful to use in gardens. It can be composted or used fresh as it doesn’t burn. The beans are easy to handle and best of all there is no smell. Alpaca manure is rich in nitrogen. Last year we had zucchini as thick as baseball bats. I didn’t take pictures then but I will be blogging more about gardening this year and taking pictures of my harvest.

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