Llama Beans & Tea

LLAMA BEANS & TEA

January 19, 2011

Everyday, llamas around the world produce time-release fertilizer capsules for your garden. These capsules are fondly called llama beans and less fondly called manure. Okay, some call it llama poop. Regardless, you can grow beautiful fruits & vegetables with a little help from a llama’s back end.

You see, llama beans serve as a nearly perfect fertilizer. These beans won’t burn plants the way that synthetic fertilizers can. So you can place time-release llama beans around your plants just as soon as they plop out of any llama. Or you can concoct llama tea by placing a cup of llama beans in a tall spray bottle and filling that bottle with plain ol' water. In a couple of days, the water will turn brown, and you can spray the roots of plants, spray aphids off your roses, and then fill that spray bottle with water 9 more times, until the water no longer turns brown. Then go get some more llama beans; there's never a shortage at a llama ranch!

Llama beans and llama tea are much better fertilizers for your garden than synthetic chemicals, which have too much nitrogen for plants, deplete the soil of micro-nutrients, and leech into drinking water. Yuck! And unless you enjoy the smell of cow, chicken or other barnyard animals’ manure, you just might want to consider switching to nearly odorless llama beans!

Let’s take a look at how llama beans are made. Here’s Pajama Llama preparing a fresh batch:

Pajama Llama cooks up some llama beans.

That was easy! Now let’s see what he made:

Genuine Llama Beans for your garden

Surprised? Yes, llama beans are small, aren't they? It's hard to imagine that they come from 350-pound, six-foot-tall animals. But llamas have a highly sophisticated digestive system consisting of one stomach with three compartments that soak the hay to soften it, then ferment the hay, and finally break the hay down with digestive enzymes. What's left? Coffee-bean-sized pellets, which the llamas deposit in dung heaps, rather than all over the yard. How considerate!

It takes five days for food to pass from the llama's mouth to its other end, but llamas eat 16 hours a day. So they are always spilling the beans.  ShangriLlama uses its llama beans to fertilize trees in the llamas' meadow. But your local petting zoo or a small zoo near you may be happy to give you their llama beans. You may be doing them a favor! Offer to bring a sturdy, taped box, disposable gloves and a hand shovel to collect the beans yourself. 

Happy Trails from Mama Llama!