7 Reasons Why You Must Grow Comfrey!

This plant here is one of the best plants any gardener can grow. And this video is seven reasons why you should consider having it in your garden. And if you already grow this, then perhaps you want to grow a little bit more, which is what I am doing. Now, this plant is a bit of a powerhouse, and it's called comfrey. For permaculturalists and gardeners, the variety that I recommend is Bokkeen 14 comfrey, which is what I have here. Why? Well, when it flowers and seeds, the seeds are infertile, so it doesn't spread everywhere. The only way that you can spread this is by you cutting it into divisions or into roots and propagating it that way. If you run it over with a rotavator, though, you will have a massive patch of comfrey. But that actually might be a really good thing. So this is an example of one of my comfrey plants that I have here that I have already harvested. And you're like, what do you mean by harvesting it? Well, let me explain. So what exactly do you harvest from comfrey? Well, it is a herbaceous perennial, which means it dies back over winter, but it grows back, and it produces a lot of biomass. So that's the first reason to grow comfrey. It produces a huge amount of biomass, which you can use to either fill your compost bins or for mulching, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But the other part of comfrey is that it accumulates a lot of nutrients. It's known as a dynamic accumulator. Now, that is a little bit iffy with the absolute scientific definition of it, but in terms of a gardening sense, it sends out a deep taproot. It takes up all of these good minerals and nutrients from the soil into the leaves, which we then harvest, and we can extract and use those nutrients from the leaves to help us grow things. Now, just behind where you guys are watching, behind the camera, there's a polytunnel with tomatoes growing in them. And the NPK of comfrey, which is a nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. It has nitrogen and phosphorus, but the potassium side, it is particularly high in, and potassium is so important for flowering and fruit set. And so if you need any reason whatsoever, just grow comfrey, just grow one single comfrey plant. It will produce enough liquid feed for you to grow a load of tomatoes either outside or in a polytunnel. And I'll kind of show you how to do that right now. So there are two very simple ways to make a liquid feed out of comfrey. If you want to use it sooner rather than later, what you do is you fill a barrel like this and you chop it up, and then you grab some water and you fill it with water. And you can use it in a couple of weeks, diluted roughly one parts this to 15 to 20 parts water. But it's gonna stink. It is absolutely gonna stink. So what you can do instead, and this is what I do, is I will put it in a bucket like this, chop it up so there's greater surface area, and then I grab a stone to use as a weight that I place on top just to press it down. I'll probably put a couple more on. Put the lid on and then just leave this in a shady place for, I don't know, maybe two or three months. And what it's gonna create is this black kind of liquid, thick liquid that you then dilute one to 40, one to 50 with water. And that is potent, but it doesn't have the smell. And you can put it in a jar and kind of bank these nutrients to then use them next growing season. Now, some of my veteran viewers might note that I'm actually wearing a glove, which doesn't happen often, but I do with comfrey, especially if I'm handling a lot of it, because it is a bit of an irritant on the skin. So just make sure you wear a glove. And long sleeves would be advisable, but I live life on the edge. Now, another way that you can use comfrey is to use it as a mulch around your tomatoes to provide a slow release of nutrients and to also help keep the moisture within the soil. Because one of the things that people don't realize about tomatoes is that they do like consistent soil moisture, particularly when they're developing the fruit. Otherwise, if it's dry and then they get a lot of moisture, that is what causes tomatoes to crack. So comfrey, like for example, I've got this little bit here. Because of its biomass, you can cut it three or four times a year. So you can get three or four harvests of leaves per year, which is why, like one of the reasons why it is such a fantastic plant to grow in the garden. This one snuck into the bed here in the polytunnel, which I don't mind one bit. It just means that I can just almost chop and drop it. And I've got some aubergines here, which I might just simply chop it and move it around these. And I'll talk about the chop and drop next, because that's a really cool permaculture technique to also another way to use comfrey. So welcome to my linear food forest, which is getting a little bit wild. You've got things like damsons and currants and a different underlayer like here. I've actually got rhubarb. Oh, that was a fail of a harvest, but you can kind of get the picture there, rhubarb. And then this beautiful thing that has been blown over because it's been quite windy is patient stock, which I do think could work as a biomass supplement to the way that comfrey grows. But more on that in another video. Similar with rhubarb, but the lovely thing here about comfrey is that in a permaculture system, you want it to be low maintenance. And so low maintenance is a core for comfrey. You kind of just plant it and forget it. It needs very little care. I might show you an example later of where I've planted comfrey and I didn't water it for two months. And out of 50 odd, only two didn't make it. So chop and drop is a permaculture principle. If you've got biomass from a plant like this patient stock or even like this nettle that I've left in, the idea of chop and drop is that it is what it says on the tin. You chop it and you drop it and that'll break down and provide fertility. So this comfrey here, which has gone a little bit beyond in its flowering and the flowers are fantastic for one thing in particular, which I'll talk about in a minute, but this comfrey, what you can do is just start to like from the top, work your way down and I'm just kind of chopping it and it's going to act as a bit of a mulch on the ground. So I'm kind of chopping it down and then I can kind of slightly adjust it to maybe move, you know, I might want to chop it up a bit finer and I might want to grab a handful and put that under the rhubarb to help feed the rhubarb. But it is just creating that mulch. So what it's doing for the plants that don't have as deep roots, it's bringing up all of those nutrients into the leaves. I'm then cutting the leaves and the stems, putting them on the surface. They'll then decompose and they'll provide that fertility that was much deeper underground. They're going to provide that fertility to the other plants that are growing around it. Now, what am I doing next to this beautiful pink Himalayan musk rambling rose? Well, beneath it, there was some comfrey growing, which I used to chop and drop and apply that to the rose. Now, comfrey, and I used the flowers to remind me, another reason to grow comfrey is if you like pollinators. Why? Well, the flowers of comfrey, there's a few up here and there's loads in the main patch down the bottom, are absolutely adored by bumblebees. Like when comfrey is flowering, it is one of the best plants that you can grow for bumblebees. Now, the great thing is, obviously I've been cutting comfrey just now that has flowers on, but the way that it regenerates so quickly, like within a couple of weeks, it's already like that tall again and looking really nice, and it will then flower again. You cut it down, it will regrow, and it will then flower again. So you can have three comfrey patches on rotation and every like month or so, you'll just harvest one of them whilst the others are growing and the other one is flowering. So you always have some comfrey flowering in the garden for your bumblebees to enjoy. So that's just a little thought to think about, or you could just grow a patch purely for the bumblebees. Now, many gardeners have a corner or patch of their garden that is a little bit awkward. It might be a little bit wet, it might be a little bit shady, it might be a bit out of the way. And you're thinking, what do I do with that space? Well, comfrey is a fantastic plant that will fill that niche. This is exactly what we've done here. At the bottom here, it's actually quite wet underfoot. In fact, it is a bog over winter, but comfrey doesn't mind. It will just survive and it will grow back. So what I've managed to do is turn this unproductive patch of land into a super productive patch of land that currently, I don't know, I've probably seen about eight or nine bumblebees around here flying around and enjoying it. That's one type of productivity to help nature. And the other part is there is so much biomass. Because it is so low maintenance, you can just plant and forget it, and it has suddenly made this very, very productive because I can harvest this and I can then move this biomass, move all of this fertility to other parts of the garden that might need it. Now, if you've just got a garden and you're putting in some compost bins, the best place to put them is kind of in the darkest, shadiest part of your garden because this isn't prime growing space. I don't want them to take up prime growing space, but I do want compost because it is so important for growing. In fact, especially if you're growing annual vegetables, you need compost really in almost all cases. Now, comfrey is a compost activator. And kind of what that means is if you're setting up a new compost bin, you put in a load of comfrey, you can put it in the core. And because it breaks down so quickly and because it has so much nutrients, it can kind of help with the kickstarting of that new compost pile. So if you're making a compost pile, put in a load of comfrey. You can also put it on in layers, a bit like a lasagna. And it's just gonna really help you create nice, beautiful, rich compost that you can use throughout your garden. So one little idea as well to further enhance your compost bins, or say if you've got a hotbed, there's a lot of fertility in this that all of the plants aren't gonna use up. And perhaps when it rains underneath your compost bin, it will release some of those nutrients. And you kind of want something to soak those up. Which is why planting comfrey at the base, I've already done a harvest of this comfrey. So this is it starting to grow back again. Grow comfrey at the base on the downward slope of a compost bin, and it will act as a sponge to help soak up some of the nutrient runoff coming from your compost bin or hotbed that you can then harvest. It's a bit like a net that you can use to harvest. And either put it back into the compost, or you can then harvest it and take it as a green compost to apply to your garden. Or if you're planting, say, some squash, you can chop it up nice and finely, put it at the base of the planting hole, add a little bit of soil over the top, and then plant it. And yeah, it's just fantastic. As you can see, comfrey is very, very versatile. And that is why I've made a whole video dedicated to it. Because it is brilliant, brilliant. Here we're doing a bit of a fun perennial project of some swales. And there's a video that I can link to down below where you can learn more about the planting of these. But this example here of the comfrey was propagated by dividing it, by dividing the crown. So all you do is, over the dormant period, from like November until March, you could even do it in April, lift up the plant and you slice it into parts or break it apart. And as long as you have a little bit of the crown, the top part, which will sprout, you'll be absolutely fine. And it will grow. And these are prime examples. We planted these, and then it didn't rain for about two months, but they still held on and they still made it, which just shows the resilience of comfrey. And another way that we're using comfrey here on site is we're doing some kind of experimental syntropic rows. And I've gone in and every couple of meters, I've put in a comfrey plant, which I'm gonna use as biomass to chop and drop as I covered earlier in the video, to simply just chop and drop it to add fertility to the other things that are growing along this row. Now, I love comfrey so much, it appears a few times in my book, The Permaculture Garden, not just how to propagate and use it, but the fact that it's one of the demonstrations of one of the core design principles of use and value renewable resources and services. The fact that when you cut comfrey and it grows back, every single time you cut it, it is a renewable resource that you can use to help make your garden more productive. So if you wanna find out more about permaculture and comfrey and working with nature rather than against it, then check out The Permaculture Garden.