My secret weapon for gardening
If you’ve read my previous articles before, you’ll know my biggest passion is for alpacas.
Yet, with a lot of land here, there is more than the animals to look after or maintain on the farm.
I am a hopeless, yet aspiring gardener. Having had nothing bigger than a postage stamp garden before moving to France, and not looking after indoor plants too well, I’m determined to learn and grow as I enter into the world of gardening here in Deux-Sevres.
We were semi-lucky with our land in that the previous owner was a landscaper, but had left the property and land unkempt for a few years, so some great plants had already been placed in beautiful places. As I scrambled though trying to tame everything and help it revive, I was lucky enough to have a secret weapon; alpaca poo! If you don’t already know, it is an incredible fertiliser (the best in my humble amature opinion), because of their special digestive system. The way I see it, every bi-product from the alpacas is a gift, just like the wool (in my eyes shearing is for their health and the wool is a wonderful gift from this), the manure is just as much of a gift we needed to find a use for too! So, this has also helped develop my interest in gardening.
I know you may be thinking I’m mad, but I have had customers telling me that their 2021 tomatoes were the best grown within their group of friends who were very envious of the deep red colour and sweet taste, after quite a wet and cool summer, and they put this down to the alpaca manure. It’s an odd idea to get your head around if you’re like me and you’re not a keen gardener, but it is odourless and comes in pellet form, so isn’t as weird as you may think.
Does your child love animals?
They can come and join us in the wonderful world of alpacas on the
Alpaca Keeper Experience
Our alpacas are handled for regular interaction and routine regular health checks. This makes them incredibly sociable and entirely safe around children
So, off I started. The idea of dead-heading the roses sounded quite brutal to me, but after seeing the results of something this simple, I was hooked. Then on to the fruit trees which were looking a little sorry for themselves. I saw a suggestion of putting the alpaca fertiliser around the base of the trunk, this way the high levels of nitrogen and potassium and normal level of phosphorus, these could get to the tree to distribute for its needs once water passed through the fertiliser sending all these nutrients into the ground for the tree to collect and use as needed. Having mastered the apple and pear trees last year, this has finally helped our struggling fig tree later this summer too. It was a really fierce summer with the drought and high temperatures and the fertiliser did everything it could retaining any morning dew or water it could find and slowly releasing this to the plants and soil surrounding it.
I absolutely adore the seasons we have in this part of the world, and in a nod to this we named our first cria (baby alpaca) on the farm Blossom, as she arrived on 5 March 2021, when all of the fruit trees just started to blossom, it seemed right and poetic. Now, I will be looking into how to use Blossom’s “gifts” to help next year’s buds and blossom around the farm flourish.
And finally, unlike my time in the UK, my indoor plants do get some love and attention as well. Rather than using the fresh fertiliser, we process it into compost tea and enrich some water with all those nutrients that we then use to feed the plants - is there anything more perfect?
This is the only way I have been able to get my head into the idea of gardening and so I am after tips and suggestions still too, so if you have some useful advice, please get in touch, and I can share my secrets of the fertiliser too - including that this is the perfect time to pile it high in your beds, creating “black gold” ready for your spring offerings.
