Propagating and Using Comfrey in the Garden

hi and welcome to rosebed homestead today we are going to talk about a very important herb that is very useful in our yards and that is comfrey we're starting here in the greenhouse because it's a very windy and hot day in early june our awful summer winds have already started those are the winds that dried out so many of our plants and killed them last summer so we are trying to learn how to deal with it and um we're going to demonstrate two different ways how to propagate comfrey and we will get started in just a moment [Music] comfrey is a very important herb to know about especially if you like to do permaculture which we do a little bit of in permaculture language comfrey is an accumulator which means that its roots go deep and accumulate minerals that a lot of plants with more shallow root systems don't ever reach and it pulls those minerals up and parks them in the leaves and so the leaves are really really useful for a lot of different things which we're going to talk about and demonstrate a couple of uses for toward the end of the video today we're going to go out to our place where we have a comfrey plant growing now i have grown numerous country plants but they don't seem to last through the winter and the reason i'm kind of excited is that i have two that came back this year which was the first time that they have done that one is in kind of a shady place and it is doing just so so but one is out there in full sun and it's been uh growing for about two and a half months and is big enough now that we're going to go get it dig it up bring the whole thing back into the greenhouse and then we're going to talk about ways of propagating and then what we're going to do with the leaves so we'll meet you out there where the comfrey is growing in full sun if we can tolerate the wind so see you in a minute okay we are standing out here in one of our brand new gills some of these plants that you see around have been here for a while we have two brand new fruit trees here and um this one isn't doing so well we're waiting to see how it does but um this is the our comfrey plant that um just came back after the winter all on its own thankfully and it is out here in full sun it gets between 14 and 15 hours of sun per day which really surprises me so we're going to dig it up and take it into the greenhouse and i'm using this flat baited bladed fork so that i'm hoping not to damage any of the roots so i'm just going to go deep and go around it just a little bit poor little plant just after it got started and it's growing right near our hose our filter holes so i'm going to have to pull that up just a little bit all right so here we go so i'm going to shake off a lot of this dirt all right so here we go let's head back to the greenhouse all right of course this plant is very stressed at the moment some of these leaves broke off but these leaves are very important and i'm going to save all of the leaves we're ultimately going to take almost all of them off the first thing i want to do is examine this root bundle right here and sort of find out where the largest of the roots are because the first propagation that we're going to do is just by root division and so it sometimes pretty naturally and that's what i'm finding right here it just kind of sort of separates itself and so i want to do that and i'm just getting all of the roots that are attached to this particular part okay so here's one and then oh goodness it looks like i can maybe do another part all right so let's see how this is going to go yep now some of those roots i tore right in half so that's not a very good thing so i will snip the oil i'm just going to leave them in place so i now can put these back in the ground and actually i'm going to have four starts five stars so this will be good and this one has already come loose so they're made i don't know about that one we'll see okay so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to cut the leaves off all of these leaves because when i put this back in the ground this plant is so stressed that it will not want to have to deal with these leaves it will need to focus on developing more roots and then the leaves will come when they come nope i'm not going to split this one again i'm just going to take these leaves off all right and then this is just a little piece notice that it has tiny tiny little start of roots so i'm going to cut this one but i'm also not going to put it back outside i'm going to start it over here in just a few minutes this one has some nice big roots on it so i'm cutting the leaves off of it and then this one is also a nice big one and i'm going to cut the leaves here too okay so i have one two three four five this is small enough that i'm going to put this one over here well no that has oh but it's disconnected so i'm going to start that one in a pot as well so one has now become five and now it's going to become even more because i'm going to take some root cuttings so on these larger roots not this size and certainly not these little tiny ones i'm going to cut about a two inch piece and set that aside up here in a separate row this one does not have any roots thick enough to take a root cutting this one certainly does i'm going to start here and cut here and i might try one that's thinner like this this one oh yes snipping up some of these thinner ones and i'm going to take two on this one and on this one i'm going to take this one and this one so in terms of root cuttings now i have one two three four five six seven so out of one plant if everything grows we will have seven now i don't want these to be out of the dirt very long so i'm going to take my hose and wet these down and then on these root cuttings i have a little bit here of um root hormone liquid hormone so i'm going to dip the bottom half in this up to about an inch and keep it in there for three five seconds and then i'm going to poke it right down in the dirt completely bury it in the dirt all the way down cover it up and i'll do the same for this one just the bottom half about an inch taking these gloves off cover the whole thing up this has some little fine roots on it so we want to stimulate those to grow so we're going to put it down in here and i'll keep doing this until these are all buried and then we'll come back so here they are all um in the dirt these two were the pieces that we're hoping will grow we'll see and then each of these four has two so we have 8 9 10 and then now we have 5 over here so that is a total of 15 that we made from this one plant now we're going to go out quickly and plant these i'm going to be moving these in the house because the greenhouse is now way too hot it gets up way above 100 110 in here even hotter on these summer days so it's too hot out here so i will do these in the house and um then we'll put these right back in the dirt and they should recover fairly quickly these will take maybe a month to start coming up but before we end the video we will be coming back and checking on these and then we'll show you the end product but before we leave for today we will come back and i'll show you what we're going to do with these leaves so let's head back out there and get these five back in the dirt as quickly as possible here is our original hole so i wet the roots here we're going to put this back and it's important to get the dirt up to the level of where the crown is exactly where it was before and notice that i'm going to be putting these in all along this soaker hose which was very i'm going to have to re-bury it when i'm done but i'm going to follow the silver hose the thing about comfrey is they are very easily transplantable you dig up the dirt ball and don't shake the dirt off the way we did today and take that whole dirt ball and put it wherever you want any place in your yard so i'm going to plant these all along here because i know this is a good place for this particular plant because this is where we got it from and i want these roots to spread out so i'm digging quite a wide little hole here and put the dirt in tuck it in all around those roots up to the same level where the dirt was before we pulled it out of the ground oh look what i found yay an earthworm i have flagged every one of these and now i'm going to water them in really well uh the water comes on this evening so they'll get more soaking but because they've just been transplanted i want to really really soak them so here are the comfort leaves after we've planted everything back out there and these never never never go to waste because um they are good chop and drop so with all of these comfrey plants what i'm hoping to be able to do is to have a lot of them that come back every spring and then i will just chop and drop them about three or four times a year and then what happens is that those leaves after they're chopped they'll just fall around the plant and that works in a lot of climates it does not work in our climate um we with these warm summer hot summer winds these leaves just dry out and do not give their minerals to anything and so if i want to drop them then what i do is i chop them or tear them into little pieces like this and then um and i can use the scissors or whatever these little trimmers and then just have a lot of little pieces like this that i'll get really wet in a bowl and then i'll figure out which plants i want to use them as a little bit of actually it's a little bit of nutrition and then i will bury these just under the top layer so that they'll stay wet and they'll decompose and give their minerals to the roots but another really quick way to do that is to simply make a little tea and my little vitamix mixer blender has served me well over the years for a variety of things and so i'm going to show you how to make a little bit of a tea these are also really good compost starters you can add the whole leaves to your compost pile and they do very very well to help generate the right kind of microbiological action that helps your compost pile grow so i'm going to make a tea now the other thing that you can do with these too is just put them in a bucket with a lid on the bucket with some water and let them decompose it adds quite a bit of microbiological life to do it that way the problem is the smell is horrific so i choose actually not to do that i like to do it just this way in my blender and so um what we'll do is we'll grind these up in the blender with a little bit of water that's in there and then we'll go pour this on some plants that might need a little extra pick me up so i'm not going to do this whole batch on camera but we'll get started so that you can see how that looks so let's try that much and we'll see we'll probably be adding some water as we go we really just want to blend the living daylights out of it [Music] all right so this is i lucked out it's just about the right consistency a little bit thick and everything is suspended in that water really nicely so let's go out and pick a few plants that we can give them a little bit of zip so this is a little bit of lemongrass that has been struggling since it came up so i'm just going to put a little bit of that foamy stuff around there and then i'm just going to gently water that in and so that should really really help that that is slowly growing but i think would appreciate a little bit of help so here we go with this one right here is the other comfrey plant that came up at the same time as that other one and you see that it is really struggling because it's a lot in the shade and so um i'm not going to put the minerals there because it's making its own but just wanted you to see the contrast between the two plants the last place is cat mint i trimmed it way back and so i'm going to give it a little bit of a zip there's a couple of things that you can do with the with the comfrey leaves and we'll grow what we have transplanted and also what we are growing in the pots and we'll get back to you periodically through that process so that you can see how they grow so we'll see you soon good morning and we're back it has been exactly two weeks since we uh took that one comfrey plant apart and scattered the pieces all over the place so we're going to do a follow-up on that and finish up this video today first of all i just want to tell you a couple of things about comfort that i haven't mentioned before we are dealing in this video with comfrey as a garden plant and what you can do with it it is also considered to be an herb it has some medicinal uses i don't ever get into that there are some very negative things about using comfrey internally it is best used externally but you can read all about that on your own we're just only treating comfrey today as as a garden herb that is very useful in terms of the permaculture practices that we employ now um two weeks ago we took that plant apart and we planted five of the pieces we separated outside and we're going to check on those in a minute and then we planted um two roots in each of these little pots and then in these two pots we took some little crown pieces that i could not plant outside because i didn't have enough root and each of them had a little root filament and so i had never done this before and i thought maybe we could get these to grow so after two weeks last night i dumped these out carefully and checked the roots just to see now comfrey is very forgiving so you can do things like that and it really does not hurt the process of growing now of these eight root pieces in these four pots seven of them are deader than door nails but there is one that has put out a root that is about two inches long and so in another month it will be ready to put out but we're not going to hang around another month and watch it grow these two i was very pleased i took them apart very carefully and both of them are producing good roots so these should also start putting out leaves shortly and i'll move those outside so let's go check to see how our five are doing out that we put in the um fruit tree guild on our way we're going to stop by and check on the lemongrass that we um that we poured some of that blended up comfrey leaves with water some of that solution on the lemongrass and we'll check out to see how it is doing so i'll meet you over at the lemongrass we're right here by this beautiful cat mint we have some honeybees collecting nectar this morning so that's always fun but here is our lemongrass and it was really languishing all spring long but that um comfrey juice seemed to really give it a healthy dose of whatever it needed to turn all green and it has grown in height then it is also spreading so i'm very pleased with the results the other places that we poured that juice the plants are also doing well but this one was especially dramatic i could tell the difference within just a few days now we're going to go over to the other fruit guild here we are in this fruit tree guild and i wanted to point out some of the other things that are growing here we have a cat meant here with more bees a couple of tomato plants i poke my tomato plants in various places and i have bee balm coming here they're all in bud here's our little tree coming along on this side over here this is lemon balm right here and right behind it is some sage and then more cat mint but why we're really here is to check the five comfrey plants that we planted and here they are this is so exciting and remember this is only two weeks so here's one and i was pleased to notice that in reality this is coming up in two different places so when i go to transplant this i can easily separate that into two plants here's our second one this was one of the slowest ones to come up here's the third one it's doing fabulous and again this one is in two or three different pieces and then there's number four and number five so this has been a tremendous success and we will get at least seven plants maybe even eight if that one little root piece that is growing its own root now it will continue to grow so this was a very successful transplant i have found a spot where comfrey does really great this is going to be my comfrey nursery from now on and when these get just a little bit larger i'm going to transplant them in various places around in our fruit tree gills where they will do more good than all being clustered right here so this was really successful thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 35,326

Keywords: Comfrey, propagating herbs, Dividing comfrey, propagating comfrey, root division of comfrey, comfrey tea, comfrey as an accumulator, permaculture and comfrey

Id: SMpc4eOpoJw

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020