How to Start Comfrey From Root Cuttings

[Music] hello here we are in our greenhouse and today I'm going to show you how to start comfrey from real cuttings and believe it or not it will even start from tiny little root cuttings like this so this is a item that you can now buy in my store and we will send these to you and you will have this beautiful comfrey now there's many many reasons why you would want to have comfrey in your garden so we will go over a few in this video and then you can read about the rest of it in the blog post the first reason is that comfrey uses these nice roots that it forms and it Minds nutrients from deeper in the soil and it brings them up into their leaves and so then all those nutrients are in the leaves you can come you can chop down those leaves and use it to activate your compost or you can use it as mulch around your plants in the garden and comfrey will come you can do that several times a year and it'll still come back and be full and beautiful and so it's not you're gonna have you know this big ugly bare spot in your garden forever it grows really quickly the other thing is is that it makes these little pretty purple flowers and the bees and the pollinators really love it so it's good for that as well it's super easy to grow it's super easy to propagate now this comfrey is barking 14 and this is the kind of comfort you want because other comfrey it will spread really bad from their seeds but Bocking 14 has sterile seeds and so the only way can be propagated is through cuttings of the root or if you just divide the plant and get crown cuttings then that's the only way it's gonna go so it won't take over your garden but it will grow the Leafs will grow really quickly we'll come back and just make a nice bushy little plant with the pretty purple flowers so I'll show you this quickly it's so so easy guys it's not even like you'll be amazed we're going to take these roots even these little tiny roots like this will sprout up and grow comfrey so it's just really awesome have some bigger roots have some little roots and is what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to put them in this pot I'm just gonna lay them out and you know what I don't even get picky about you know if they overlap a little bit just want to be gentle when you pull them out of the pot now this you can plant them right in your garden but I like to plant them like this so that they have some greenery when I plant them and I don't forget where I plant them and like dig them up or something when I planting something else and so this is how I prefer to do it so I just have them in the pot there and I'm just gonna put some dirt on top just a couple of inches and they will be ready to go now we can take anywhere from 20 days to like 3 to 4 weeks to have is the general time frame for it to before it just sprout I'm just gonna cover with dirt and then water it and just keep it watered and it will just sprout up and then you can plant it out into the garden and I will show you how to do that and so we'll head over to the garden but before we head there I just wanted to show you what it looks like the crown cutting so a crown cutting is gonna look like those fatter roots but it's gonna have a little bit of greenery on it and still you only need a chunk of roots it's kind of deceiving because you think oh it's just this fat root and there's no like little feeler roots which it does get those but if you don't have them on that big fat chunk of root that's ok it will still sprout and it'll still just grow and be beautiful so these are pound cuttings and then this pot here was a mix of crown cuttings and root cuttings that we just dug up earlier in the spring and we weren't quite ready to plant it out we throw them in here the crown cuttings have come up you can see here's a little one here that I'm sure must be from one of the roots and I think I planted some of the ones from the root cuttings too but we're going to go get some of these planted and we'll see what it looks like at the root level okay we were headed over to the garden we were gonna plant that and we walked by this comfrey and I just thought I'd stop and show you because about a week ago we took at least 2/3 of this away and it's already almost filled out now the week ago it was a little bit smaller because we've had rain and Sun and it's so it's grown a lot but that's how quickly it grows and so probably this summer the biggest you know it'll be like this and then it'll get about this tall and then the flower stalks get a little bit taller that's how quickly it grows and recovers I mean two-thirds of this it has just done so well and it just looks really nice now okay here we are in the garden I'm gonna plant this comfrey right here in front of this little thing and look at you could see all these roots that are growing here and I'm gonna try and break this up and find one it came from a smaller root I'll look it okay here is one that was from a big chunk but you can see the roots growing up there so we'll put that one back in another one I don't know if we get any of those skinny ones in here all disturbed here that's okay because I know it'll come right back funny and I just want to here's a smaller one it's still kind of fat but there you can see okay there we go there's even a smaller one it goes right up so just that tiny little piece you can see these new little roots that are growing off of it so see that there and we're gonna go ahead and plant one of these bigger ones cuz like I said I like them when I plant them out to have the green on it so that I know where it is and I don't plant something else there and have to get up I'm just gonna put this here oh there's my little helper it's our little pet duck okay now all we have to do is water it now this is pretty easy because you can you can kind of tell where it was but it's not super picky either I would probably plant it about three to four inches deep if I'm planting something like this probably closer to three but they shoot up quite a long ways and they are happy and it's really not that picky see this one has a lot of nice little new roots on it so I hope this helps you guys out and I just really encourage you to plants come free we will be putting it under our trees so that we can just chop them use them as mulch feed that to our trees throughout the garden and just all over because the bees love it and really it's actually a really beautiful plant with the flowers and everything so I really like it it's a nice perennial to have it's really Hardy and just makes for a beautiful nice round piece in the garden so if you guys would like something if you need any of this like I said I have it in my store and you could find it over there I hope you guys come back and visit me next time and we'll see you then [Music]

Channel: Rolling Hills Farm ND

Views: 902

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: lcFOVhcabl0

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020