Like most permaculture people, we have a love of and respect for comfrey here at ABC acres. Comfrey is a plant with many uses, from herbal health to serious soil-building, and as such we view it as a key player in several of the systems we have been designing and developing over the past 3 1/2 years here. We also encourage others to add it into their aspiring permaculture properties in order to reap the rewards of this hardy and vigorous plant.

Over the past few growing seasons, we have multiplied our number of comfrey plants several times over, but have not had to do so by ordering more from an online nursery. Fortunately for us and the land, the prolific taproots of this plant not only dynamically accumulate nutrients from the subsoil, but also are easy to dig up, cut into 1 1/2” to 2” sections, and then plant into the ground elswhere, becoming new comfrey plants themselves! The number of root cuttings you are able to divide off of the dug up roots will depend upon how loose and workable your soil is around your comfrey plant. In a well-developed veggie garden, we divided a couple comfrey plant root systems into well over 100 root cuttings, which we then planted by our fruit and nut trees in our tree belts, in our hugelkulture beds, and wherever else we wanted to condition soil, build organic matter, provide food for bees, feed livestock, and have a ready source of herbal medicine at the ready.

We have since made a small comfrey nursery bed, so we can go and pop up a root system, trim off what we need, and then plug just a small chunk back into the soil so we can come back to the same space a year later and do it again. In our comfrey nursery bed, we have observed over the past season that it has suppressed the weed growth in the bed rather effectively, as we planted the root cuttings about a foot apart. Part of this is due to the fact that comfrey, in its hardiness, begins to grow early in the spring, and its quick growth will fill in a space nicely before something else can fill its niche.

With this observation in mind, we decided to use this characteristic of comfrey to our advantage in some of our food hedge planting projects this season. In order to maintain the edge between the trees and shrubs we planted and the pasture, we are planting 1 1/2” root cuttings of comfrey on 1’ centers along our plantings. Ordering hundreds of comfrey root cuttings would cost a decent amount of cash, but by doing a little root division, we can easily multiply the plants into an army of future comfrey plants. They will reduce weeding requirements and keep the pasture from encroaching back into the hedge planting line, which would cause competition for water and nutrients with our newly planted edible trees and shrubs.

By using the comfrey as a boundary defense, we will conquer the pasture’s charge in the battle for the edge while also giving us a great source of nutrient-dense mulch from the comfrey, which can be chopped and dropped around our edibles 3-5 times per season, with the hardy perennial quickly regrowing each time. In fact, comfrey is so vigorous, that one should be aware that you should only plant it where you want it to be long-term, which for us isn’t a problem, as we want a long-term relationship with this tremendous member of the plant kingdom for its many valuable attributes and benefits.

Blessings,

Grant