Hello and a very warm welcome back to HuwsNursery. Now if someone came
up to me and asked me what's one plant that I'm not growing enough of then easily
my answer would be comfrey. And in today's video I want to look at comfrey
and how powerful and useful is for growing food especially if we're
following permaculture principles. So just before I get into speaking about
comfrey I just want to give you guys a heads up about the Permaculture Magazine.
Now my father and I have been subscribers for quite a few years now
and this is just through my passion of the magazine and I really think if you are
interested in sustainable living and permaculture then you should definitely
take a look at this magazine and I actually have an article coming out in
the next edition which is really exciting. So they ship worldwide if
you do subscribe you can access over 80 previous issues which is really good. And it's
such a wealth of fantastic information. Anyway, there are details down below in the
video description if you're interested. We have clusters of comfrey all around
the smallholding and comfrey prefers to grow in full sun to partial shade and it's a
perennial herb and the main quality about comfrey is its taproot and its
toproot can sometimes reach up to 10 feet deep. So comfrey is what's known as
a dynamic accumulator which means it mines minerals and nutrients from the
ground and draws it up to its leaves and the leaves are actually so full in macro
and micronutrients for example is really high in nitrogen with a carbon to
nitrogen ratio of around 10 to 1 in wilted leaves. Also it's really high in
potassium and phosphorus so this means comfrey can make an ideal plant
fertilizer or a compost which will help aid vegetables and fruits to grow, flower
and also fruit well.
You can think of the taproot almost like a straw where it draws up all the
nutrients and minerals for example micro nutrients like calcium which is
essential
for plants to develop strong cell walls.So for us vegetable gardeners, it's the
leaves which were most interested in, and in the next section of this video I'm
going to show how we can best utilize leaves using a couple of different
methods in order to get the most out of the fruit and vegetables that we grow.
Comfrey is native in Europe and Asia however in the 17th century it went over
to America and has settled in
really well there and you can find it in a lot of gardens and in fact the most
popular variety of comfrey which is grown around the world is the bocking
14 which is a really good variety in this can grow up to 3 feet, so a meter in
height and it can spread really well depending on the habitat has. So the
first thing that you can do when you have a lot of comfrey is to make a
liquid feed, so making liquid feed is really easy I usually makes about fifty
percent comfrey with fifty percent nettles and nattles are actually a
another fantastic plant to use to make a high quality and high nutrient dense
plant feed. So making the feed is really easy, all you need to do is to collect
the materials now you will want to wear gloves
I know you probably will be wearing gloves with stinging nettles but with comfrey the tiny
hairss can be irritant to your skin to wear gloves and cut as much as you want.
Comfrey is really good because you can cut it three to four times a year as
long as it has enough nutrients. And then simply use your hands and tear this up
into lots of pieces and this just increases the surface area. Now place this
into a bucket, press it down and then cover it with a load of water almost to
the top and then all you need to do and this is a simplest recipe is simply place
something over-the-top and leave it in a cool but airy place for about three to
four weeks now it will be quite a smelly mixture because there is quite a high protein
content in comfrey
and also in nettles. However all you need to do is to strain out the plant fertilizer
and then dilute it about one parts of the fertilizer to eight to ten parts water
and increase the amount of water use the longer you have the plant fertiliser
sitting there. Now this is really good if you want to give your tomatoes a feed
or if you have any seedlings or any areas of garden which you think a lacking
nutrients.
Comfrey also is a fantastic mulch material.
Unfortunately our tomato season this year hasn't been very successful, we have
got quite a few tomatoes however it hasn't stood out and the plants have
been struggling.
However because the comfrey is so high in the vital macronutrients, now they
don't need nitrogen but they need the phosphorus and potassium to really help
them get a boost to help the fruits ripen so I'm just going to apply a layer
of the comfry leaves, and these are going to break down into the ground and give a
boost of the nutrients that we need to really help the tomato fruit to ripen.
So the final thing I want to cover is propagation and there are two really
easy things that you can do to propagate more and this is something I'm going to
be doing more of next year so the best time to do these two methods is early
spring so the first method is to take root cuttings which are about one to two
inches or 2.5 to 5 centimeters in length, simply take out part of the plant, cut
these roots to size, and then put these into a pot of fifty percent soil and
fifty percent compost and then keep this watered quite well and then you'll soon
get a very successful amount of comfrey plants. Also you can divide them in early
spring just use a spade and split the plant in half or into quarters and
they're quite tough things they will look a bit sad but they will soon poke out
and then you'll have loads more comfrey.