The Most Important Plant to Grow: Propagate Comfrey 4 Ways

hey everybody welcome back to another Nature's always right episode this one is a really important one whether you're a home Gardener or a farmer we're going to be talking about how to make unlimited plants of comfrey which if you don't know about comfrey it's one of the most useful plants on the planet for medicinal reasons U for nutrient creation you can make fermented plant juice out of it you can make kind of an Anor robic tea out of it you can use it as animal uh feed you can use it as a compost accelerator it's also a Minds lot of minerals out of the ground it's also high in nitrogen so if you need some good greens for your compost that's it's fantastic um it's a good chop and drop just mulch it's great for putting around trees I've even um recently I heard a farmer talking about planting it around a tree system if you have really invasive grasses um it'll kind of stop it from encroaching in further so it just a lot of different uses for this thing I've used Med medicinal salves out of this as well so anyways we're going to talk about the four four ways that you can propagate comfrey whether from seed or from root or crown so let's go check out the plant and how to do this so here's where I have some of my comfrey patches and comfrey is a plant that if you leave a root behind it will grow back and become another plant so it is pretty invasive so you want to keep in mind where you're planting this it's not going to go away and it's even more hard to get rid of than even like a sweet potato so wherever it's going to go make sure it's a place that you are fine with it being permanent and it coming back every single year if you get the true seed uh comfrey then also think about that if you are willing to let the seed either drop around and create new comfy or Let It Blow and go somewhere else to have comfy so that's also something else to think about all right so let's just go ahead and dig it up and then we'll separate everything and get it going I'll show you a picture of what a comfrey plant looks like so that you can recognize the leaves you can see a couple of them here it has a very distinct look and this plant's been here for probably 3 years so it's got some really good root systems under here okay okay and then that's all we're going to need as you can see here's our piece of the comfy route you know here's more of the comfy route this is going to come back another plant next year so the first thing we need to do is just divide this up and the plants divided up into roots and then Crown use my H Hy knife to cut this apart make it easier if you haven't seen my little review of the Hy hor knife and how cool it is there things you can do with it okay so here is the full crown and here's the root attached so now we can Pro propagate both of these the root root you just need about an inch this will take much longer to root out and to Leaf out than the Crown this will take like 4 weeks or maybe longer depends when you're propagating if you're propagating in spring or summer um the higher heat is going to help speed up that process if you're trying to do it in winter or something um if you live in cold temperatures it's going to take a long time or it might not even work now the crown at the top here this will this will root and um grow really fast for you and you can even split up the crown like I just did and now there's two plants here use a one gallon this are 700ml cups you can use whatever you have for the crowns it needs to be a bit longer if there's a little bit of the green sticking up on the crown that's totally fine I think that's even better for it just like that and then you're going to want to leave this in a place that is outside of direct sunlight let it sit there um until you start seeing actual New Growth when you start seeing the plant um respond and start seeing Healthy Growth then you know there's some roots and it started to take hold so then you could put it out into the Sun and then treat it like a normal plant you can also use smaller Roots like this it really doesn't matter um they will work I've noticed though that the thicker Roots seem to have a higher success rate the crowns are basically a guaranteed success rate these smaller Roots uh maybe it's more like an 80% success rate something like that so for the roots you want to plant them I'd say a minimum of an inch you can do you can go down a couple inches the next technique that I'm going to show you is burying it just in the ground and I've experimented with that I've planted it like 4 in down and it still had the ability to pop through if you have your smaller ones use the smaller route just break it if it already has some roots on it um that's really beneficial it'll have a easier time recovering they can grow roots from nothing though if they didn't have any of this and it's just the bare thing it'll pop Roots out of here on each side and that's it and then I just need to water these in these are good to go so that's two ways let's show you the Third Way so the next way to propagate comfrey if you have the right variety of comfrey and I don't remember the exact Latin name but I'll put a link to the where I got to the seeds which is organic.com and they sell the true comfrey plant which will produce viable seed I this is from 2017 when I saved them I have planted these seeds confirmed that yes in fact they do create another comfy plant so that's really cool now for saving seeds I have a really good tip for you that I learned I think from watching a YouTube video a long time ago so these are called organza bags they're used for putting jewelry in or I don't know what people really are supposed to use them for but you know it's 100 bags for like five bucks or something so what you'll want to do this is can be used on basically any flour that's going to seed after the flower has has bloomed and it you'll notice that it will fall off after it's been pollinated so wait for a section of flowers to look pretty much done with the dried out petals this goes for most plants or starting of the formation of the seed sometimes that's a better timing to put this on because you want to make sure that it gets pollinated first you'll put this over the top of the flower section squeeze and now all the flour and seeds are contained within here so over the next couple weeks as you're waiting for the seeds to dry and fall into the bag you don't have to worry you don't have to pay attention you just leave the bag on it um and then come back harvest the seed and then separate out the stuff you don't want so highly recommend this I'll put a link to the description to this and any anything else I think might help you for this process and there's nothing special special about comfy seed plant it a half an inch and waight okay so I've shown you three ways you can propagate by root by Crown by seed but all of those you kind of have to do two steps you plant it in another pot wait till it grows out then you plant it in the ground well my fourth way is the best way if you want to plant a lot of comfrey um like hundreds of plants or a big comfrey patch or you just have some different areas you like to bring more fertility to more diversity any of that this technique works perfectly and I did this in my other neighbor's yard so you're just going to dig a little you know 2-in hole toss it in cover it up compress it a little and that's it so you can see how fast it will go you know you could do 100 in an hour very very very easily hundreds in an hour and then if you're during your part of your dry season or you're in a drought of course water if you're in the rainy season like I am right now the ground's already super moist and we'll get rain in the next week or two anyways so I can just leave this so um doing this technique during a Time year when it rains and you can count on that is perfect um like in San Diego I wouldn't do this at the beginning of Summer cuz we're not going to get rain so that means I got to come out here and water it and do all that so for me in San Diego propagating in winter is the best because then spring it comes up and for most people I think that will be the case that you'll want to propagate these um and win or the previous fall wait till the spring and then plant them really hope this video helped you learn more about comfy what an amazing plant it is and how useful it is in the garden and of course just how easy it is to propagate so I just highly recommend having this plant on hand for anybody who grows their own food one other thing I forgot to mention that it's really good at is pollination I've seen anything from a hummingbird to a butterfly to bees to you name it every pollinator loves the comfy plant so it's another fantastic thing about it

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 64,909

Keywords: garden, gardening, urban farming, permaculture, organic gardening, organic farming, nature's always right, market gardening, urban gardening, how to propagate comfrey, how to propagate comfrey plants, the most important plants, comfrey benefits, comfrey cuttings propagation, comfrey root cuttings, comfrey cuttings, comfrey propagation, propagating comfrey root cuttings, propagating comfrey from seed, comfrey plant, epic gardening, how to grow comfrey

Id: IMGzSkzO8Co

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020