A New Comfrey Bed

18th March 2017
Re-reading the works of Lawrence D Hills (founder of the UK organic movement) has inspired me to make better use of my comfrey plants.

My established comfrey plants are coming up fast.

Half a comfrey plant will make many more.

They are of the variety Russian Bocking 14, which importantly does not self-seed all over the place. Instead you multiply it by dividing the rootstock. This is the time of year to perform this operation, just as the leaves of established plants are poking their heads up into the spring air.

It is achieved by simply plunging a spade into an existing plant. The considerable rootstock is surprisingly juicy and crisp. I like to leave at least half of the old plant in its place, but the other half can be subdivided into a dozen new plants easily. In theory, each small part of root will become a new plant, but I like to use a part of root which is throwing up new leaves. I think this may be the difference between a root cutting and an offset, though I may be wrong! Anyway, you can't really go wrong with comfrey.

I guess the only thing would be to establish a bed where you don't want it to be in a few years time, for the depth of the roots and the ease with which they grow into new plants when chopped up means that getting it out of the ground is almost impossible (repeated doses of weedkiller would have to be the solution I guess)

Today I used three of my established plants to create a new bed of 50 plants! The parent plants will be back to their best very quickly and by next year the young plants will have caught up with them.

Why do I need this much comfrey? Mainly as a natural fertiliser and as a compost component. Comfrey has extraordinarily deep roots which bring nutrients from way down. The leaves can be cut half a dozen times a year and if you let it flower it is much appreciated by the bees. I have planted a few in odd corners which I allow to flower, but the main beds I try to keep on top of cutting.

Comfrey leaves can be put straight into the ground under transplanted seedlings or laid on top as a mulch. They can be added to the compost heap or steeped in water to make a tomato feed soup. If I can grow enough, I intend to feed it to the chickens too as a once a week treat.

It took me most of the morning to create my new bed (much of which was taken up extracting dock roots and creeping thistle from the new site) which is down in the spare veg patch, next to the compost bins there.

While we are on the subject of compost, I now have a new source of horse manure. Next door have a fancy poo hoover and today I took delivery of my first poo, all nicely chopped up. It will be a fantastic addition to the compost bins, adding goodness and considerably speeding up the rate at which they turn garden rubbish into black gold.

Much of last year's mature compost went onto the veg beds at the beginning of winter. More specifically it went onto the beds where this year I will grow potatoes. It has been rotting down and being incorporated into the soil by the worms.
Today I took Mr Rotavator onto those beds and managed to turn them. Mr Rotavator has been a bit poorly of late. His engine has been running far too fast and threatening to explode! I have poked around a little bit and today he seemed to run fine which was a relief as now is not a good time for him to throw a sickie!

New potatoes and rows of turnip seedlings

doing well in the polytunnel

Double protection for the carrot seedlings

I was hoping to get my early spuds into the ground, but the heavens opened and drove me into the polytunnel. In there the extra early potatoes have already reached the surface. We should have scrummy new potatoes just as last year's stored tubers have run their course.
I sowed a new row of turnips too and resowed the carrots. For the second year in a row they seemed to disappear as soon as they germinated. I have taken the precaution of cloching the new ones in case it is too cold for the seedlings at night time. I have scattered some organic slug pellets in there too to cover that option.

The rain never stopped for the rest of the day. I did all the work I could think of to do in the tunnel and then retreated indoors.

The evening was spent at a Race Night (lots of gambling, drinking and eating, all in moderation of course) to raise money for Sue's school. They raised over £1000 which is not bad for a small village school. The money will be used to pay for the children to go to the pantomime later in the year. I reckon it should be Jack and The Beanstalk or Mother Goose.

A Stinking Comfrey Bath Full of Rat-tailed Maggots

Two of my previous posts have become unexpectedly linked. For it wasn't long ago that I encountered this creature in my polytunnel

 

This is a drone fly, so called because of its superficial resemblance to a honey bee. It appeared in my post about polytunnel intruders.

Now just outside the polytunnel sits this old bath, full of stinking comfrey juice.

It is just rainwater with a bag of comfrey leaves immersed, but this makes the water go really quite disgusting. It has a rather unappealing aroma too, though you get used to it. But it's worth it for the black gold it produces, free plant food which my tomatoes love. For more on growing and using comfrey, you can visit this post.

So you're probably wondering what these two subjects have to do with one another. Well my tomatoes are just forming their first fruits now so I decided yesterday to start feeding them but, as I approached the bath of black liquid, I could see what appeared to be hundred of slugs swimming around in it, slugs with tails! The last thing I would want to do is pour slugs, or anything similar, all over my crops.

So a quick internet search for "water larva spiky tail" brought me instantly to the answer at uksafari.com.

The aquatic larvae of droneflies are known as Rat-tailed maggots.  They develop in stagnant water, animal faeces and rotting carcasses.  The more putrid and foul-smelling it is, the more the larvae seem to like it.
Each larva is equipped with an extendible tail called a 'siphon'.  This tail, which can extend to about 5cm (2 inches), is used as a snorkel to breath air from the surface of the liquid while the larva feeds below.

Special features:  Drone flies look similar to honeybees (hence the 'drone' name), but they lack the narrow waist between the thorax and abdomen.  They also have just two wings, where the honey bee has four.

The body is brown to black in color, quite hairy, with varying amounts of orange/yellow markings on the side of the second and third abdominal segments.

The males have large eyes which meet in the centre, while the females have smaller eyes with a gap in between.


When they are fully grown, the larvae leave the water to pupate.  The pupae are a reddish-brown colour.  At the front are some horn-like projections, and the tail often curves up and over the back of the body.

Mystery solved.

Beans, beans, beans.

Against all tradition, the bank holiday weekend we've just had gave us some most glorious weather.

So it was time for a drastic haircut.



a haircut for the orchard grass



a haircut for the hay meadow
(thanks Don)

and my twice yearly haircut.

I paid for it with burnt ears, a rather raw neck and sore temples. For, as I took advantage of the sunshine and put in a very long weekend outside, areas of skin long-covered by my rather wild hair were exposed to ultraviolet rays for the first time in a long while.

In the veg patch, this weekend was all about the beans. They have been growing happily in the protective environment of the polytunnel but, now that all danger of frost has passed (I sincerely hope), they will grow into stronger plants in the soil outside.

During last week the Runner Beans went in. I have changed varieties this year. As with all my beans, I have prioritised stringlessness. Much as I like to grow heritage varieties, I find a stringy bean somewhat akin to a fish full of bones. So, for the runners, I have plumped for two varieties. Armstrong, a red flowered cultivar, and White Lady, surprisingly a white-flowered type, but more significantly white beans for drying.

I ran out of time to dig trenches for the beans, which should be
filled with compost, newspaper and all manner of rotting
material.
So instead, I transplanted each young plant onto a bed
of comfrey leaves, which should provide plenty
of goodness as they rot down.

Some French Beans have gone into the ground in the polytunnel too.

Yardlong (though the beans are best harvested before they reach this length), Cobra, Pea Beans (again for dried beans) and climbing Borlottis.

The spares have gone outside to brave the British weather. But my main French bean variety outside is Blue Lake, with its small, white haricot beans. I grew a few two years ago and the beans were beautifully crisp with not a hint of string.

We also planted some purple climbing beans, Blauhilde. These have gone in as seeds, rather than plants raised in the polytunnel.

Likewise, three types of dwarf beans: Canada Wonder, which can be stringy but should yield a good harvest of kidney beans for drying; Tendergreen; and Helda, which I snapped up ridiculously cheap at the end of last year.

All my beans will grow accompanied by climbing nasturtiums and sweet peas, to make them more attractive both to the human eye and to pollinating insects.

There's also an experiment going on with more exotic beans, nabbed from the kitchen store cupboard. More on this later.

Black Gold

Saturday 2nd June 2012

See! I was serious about wearing the bee suit when mowing the lawn, though the bees behaved themselves today. With rain and showers forecast for the week ahead, I had another mammoth mowing session today, doing both lawns, the goose paddock, the veg patch, the soft fruit garden, the orchard and I carved a couple of paths through the meadow right to the end of the land. 

Fed up with the damp grass clogging up the machine, I gaffer-taped the metal contact at the back and bypassed the need for a collection box or a deflector. (Do not try this at home! The safety mechanism is there for good reason!) Notwithstanding this warning, the plan worked fabulously, though the mowings flew yards out of the back of the machine. This was OK when I mowed North to South, but when I turned I got a face full of grass and, over time, the back of my jumper began to resemble a football pitch!

Two things happened during the day to interrupt my mowing. First, and delightful it was too, I paused to watch a swallow playing with a goose feather. Four times it caught the feather mid air, only to release it and swoop again. I thought it was collecting the feather for its nest, but since it eventually left it to float back to the ground, I assume the swallow was either playing or just plain gave up.

The second thing that happened was this...

A bumper apple year last year meant that Don was unable to eat his way through all of his stored apples. This is very good news indeed for the pig family.

Black Gold

Achievement for the day went to the comfrey bin though. I hadn't checked the bucket for a while and got a really good surprise when I did. Expecting to possibly find a few drips of oily black liquid, instead I found over an inch of liquid. This will be diluted about 15:1 to make a fertiliser. And this from just one cut of less than half the comfrey bed. With about five cuts a year, that's a lot of fertiliser. The reason that comfrey is so good at collecting nutrients from the soil is that its roots go down as far as 10 feet. It can be soaked in water to give a fertiliser or leaves can be compressed and the black sludge collected as they break down. The leaves can also be used as a mulch or placed into planting holes to give plants a good start in life.

Ideally the leaves are cut just before the plant flowers. This is when they are at their most potent. However, I like to leave some of the plants to flower for the bees and for their beauty.

Beware of the Fenland nettle
I once did a study on nettles as part of  a Field Biology course. It involved counting the stinging hairs on the surface of the leaves. There was an astonishing difference between the stingiest and the least stingy. (Please read these two words with a hard g.) It transpired that nettles evolve locally to become much more potent when they are subject to grazing. So the rabbits have a lot to answer for. Our nettles are like no others I have come across. They get you through jeans and gloves, and once stung they leave tingling and numbness for hours.

But nettles are, on the whole, a good thing... like any other 'weed', if they have a use then they are good as long as they are controlled. They provide an excellent habitat for insects and are the food plant of small tortoiseshell caterpillars as well as being the host plant to comma and red admiral butterflies and many moths. Not only that, but they can be used in a similar way to comfrey, so today I carefully cut one of our nettle patches and topped up the comfrey bin. Basically, I am using the comfrey and nettle leaves as a means to collect nutrients and transport them to where I want them.

Are we sitting comfrey?

Thursday 17th May 2012

Comfrey.
The bees love it. The veg plants love it. I love it.


Comfrey grows at an astonishing rate and tolerates being cut right back four of five times a year. This gives a huge yield of greenery from the comfrey bed.


OK, I hear you say, but what do you do with it? Eat it?


The value of comfrey lies in its deep roots which are incredibly efficient at tapping into nutrients. It can be simply added to the compost heap or used as a mulch, or the leaves can be steeped in a barrel or bath of water to give a very good plant feed.

But I plan to produce something much more potent. So, for this purpose, today I cannibalised a broken old pallet and built my Comfrey and Nettle Juice Extraction Unit.
Into the bin go chopped up leaves, weighed down (and covered when I make a more suitable weight) and at some point a thick, smelly black sludge will start to drip out of the bottom into waiting bucket. This is plant feed liquid gold and a little bit goes a very long way.


Until now I had forgotten, too, that the wilted leaves can be fed to chickens. I must try that very soon.


Only half of my comfrey bed would fit into the plastic bin, so I have left the rest and as yet there is no room for nettles in there either. I will hopefully get into a routine of topping it up every week. Meanwhile I will let some of the comfrey flower for the bees and the nettles, as long as they're growing in the right places, provide a wonderful home for all sorts of beneficial insects. I won't let all the comfrey flower, as I believe that flowering takes up a lot of energy which would otherwise be put into the leaves.


And before anybody points out that comfrey can all too easily turn into a most unwelcome and ubiquitous weed, I purchased Russian Comfrey Bocking 14 variety, available from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. This was developed in the 1950s by Lawrence D Hills, a leading early figure in the organic gardening movement. Bocking 14 is sterile, so can only be spread by root division. This I will be doing next year, as I want to have little patches of this wonderplant all around the veg patch and fruit area.

And a big patch near the chickens too, so that I don't forget to include it in their feed.

Meanwhile the asparagus shoots reach for the skies.
So tempting just to eat a few, but not this year.