Why you should grow Comfrey

The leaf is 5% Potassium which we know it is pulling from up to 6 feet down. Watch the video and learn why you should not injest it and why you can use it.

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I would never have clicked on a video like this if you hadn’t have put the link here @clarkinks . The reason being that I don’t typically click on YouTube videos that have “gimmicky” titles. But, I have to say, this was actually a very well done video. Thanks for posting this!

I started growing Bocking 14 comfrey maybe 8 or 10 years ago. I am going to start a KNF style ferment tomorrow for my plants! :slight_smile:

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I started bocking 14 comfrey in the mulch rings of most of my fruit trees this spring. It grows very well here. Lots of big thick fuzzy leaves and blossoms.

I just finished my second chop and drop with it.

TNHunter

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beware fermenting comfrey smells like the most rotten fish when fermenting. your neighbors will look for where the smells coming from. i just chop and drop now instead. great to smother weeds in the drip line. if you can grow it, rhubarb does the same and gives you something to eat. dont know the n.p.k of them but i would imagine its similar.

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Anyone know where I can get the comfrey that has viable seeds? (Yes I know it spreads like crazy)

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urban farmer sells seed.

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Oh and their shipping is reasonable! I’ll have to look around for other stuff from them. Thanks !

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Comfrey is supposed to be a companion plant for fruit trees - but I think in my yard it’s the other way around. Worry that the comfrey is using up most of the nutrients

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just chop a bunch of that down to the stems and throw it around the little empty patch to rot back into the soil. that’s pretty much what it’s for

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Took me about 5 years to kill off the comfrey I planted. It was traveling underground and popping up and I realized I didn’t get the “well behaved” comfrey I was supposed to have received. Really irritated me coming up around my bird’s nest spruce.

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Yeah I don’t plant it around my trees. It’s around the chicken run and I just chop and drop around them.

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KNF ferments use sugar, with no water, so it ends up smelling like sweet vinegar. :+1:

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If you grow from seeds you’re going to have it spreading everywhere.

The Bocking comfreys are sterile and stay put. If you want to spread it you need root cuttings.

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He specifically wanted non sterile.

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I need to follow along better. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I ordered some too ! Along with like 6 other things :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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i did mine years ago with molasses but i added some water and a bubbler. possibly one of the worse smelling things i ever smelled.

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whatcha get

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I think it’s the extra water that you added, along with not enough sugar. That’s just my guess. I have made FPJ with comfrey, honeysuckle, and thistles (separately) in the past and had zero issues with smell. I just use equal weight of chopped leaves and non gmo cane sugar, no bubbler needed.

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That’s a widespread myth. Both forms set seed, but neither tends to set very much since they usually don’t get properly pollinated. Bumblebees do nectar robbing; biting into the side of the flowers to reach the nectar without pollinating them.

I did a seed count on one of my Russian hybrid comfrey plants last year and compared against seed count of a non-hybrid common comfrey and I actually found a higher ratio of seeds to total flower production from the hybrid “sterile” plant! I planted most of the seeds from the “fertile’“ common comfrey and germination was low with the resulting seedlings growing very slow. I doubt they’d even survive in the competition of the open garden unless they got really lucky.

Outside of their native range, both forms seem to predominantly rely on clonal reproduction via root cuttings. I suspect that in their native range there must be a well adapted pollinator species which actually helps them to set seed more reliably.

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