Increase Your Comfrey Patch by Dividing Plants

Dividing Comfrey

Comfrey is so easy to divide that you could start out with just one plant and quickly have enough for all your composting needs. You can learn more about this amazing plant and why it makes such good compost here (links to PDF file). If you don’t have any comfrey yet, make sure you buy the Russian comfrey that doesn’t set seeds. The English variety, which is used for medicinal reasons, can become invasive. Comfrey is a wonderful plant, but only if you decide where it lives.

My three-year goal is to transform my small city lot into a self-sufficient “farm,” and grow enough vegetables and eggs to feed one person all year long. I have enough land, even on my small plot, but the problem with turning any type of garden venture into a truly self-sustaining enterprise is the need to replenish the organic material that is removed whenever you harvest a crop. Compost is the obvious solution for an organic gardener, and the only solution if you don’t have a spread big enough to raise animals for their manure.

The limitation with compost is the amount of organic material you have on hand to make the compost. If you want to make enough compost to keep your garden at it’s optimal fertility – without bringing in organic material from outside – you need to grow plants specifically for compost. I use a lot of comfrey for compost, both because of it’s high mineral value and because I’ve discovered that my red worms will turn comfrey into beautiful compost in about a month. Unfortunately, I never seem to have enough.

In order to increase my comfrey plantation so I’ll have enough material for the amount of compost I’ll need to reach my goal in three years, I need to divide my current plants and increase the amount of land where comfrey grows.

Fortunately, increasing the number of comfrey plants is very easy to do. Here’s how:

First, check over your garden plan and find a spot where you won’t mind looking at a fairly boring plant. Not ugly, mind you, just boring.

You also want to make sure its a spot that won’t be needed for anything else anytime soon. Comfrey is difficult to get rid of once it’s established because it’s roots go down very deep in the soil. A tiny piece of root will regrow into a full-sized plant. That’s why it’s so easy to make new plants – but it’s also why it’s so hard to get rid of a comfrey plant if you decide you don’t want it any more.

We like those deep roots – they bring up minerals from the subsoil so other plants can use them. That’s the biggest reason why comfrey makes such good compost, especially for the potatoes and tomatoes in your garden.

Once you know where your new plants will go, prepare the soil. You don’t need to get carried away – the roots are strong and will do much of the digging for you. Just remove the weeds, loosen the soil, make a hole and fill it with good compost or manure. You can even use chicken manure, which would be too strong for most plants. In the photo below I’m filling the hole with some worm compost that isn’t quite finished yet – but the comfrey won’t mind.

Preparing Soil for Compost

Now choose the plant you intend to divide and use your garden fork to dig up a bit of it. An established plant can be divided into 8 or more starts. If you don’t need that many, you can just remove one side of the old plant, as I did, or dig up the whole plant, take off as many divisions as you need, and stick the remaining plant back in the hole. Remember to add compost to the old plant, to help it recover.

Four New Comfrey Plants

In the photo above, you can see the four new starts on the left, and the plant from which they were removed on the right. If you want as many starts as you can get from one plant, just take all the roots and divide them up. There will still be roots left in the ground, and they’ll regrow even if the entire top of the plant has been removed. The plant in the photo below was divided this way about a month before the photo was taken, and as you can see it has completely recovered.

Comfrey Plant Has Regrown

Most perennials need to be coddled a bit when they’re divided. This plant was dug up in the middle of summer, when temperatures were in the 90′s. However, you do need to take care to keep the roots from drying out, so once you have your starts removed from the parent plant, be sure to cut off the leaves from the new plants. This will help the roots stay moist until they can regrow. Throw the leaves in the compost bin, give them to your worms, or allow them to wilt a bit and then feed them to your chickens.

Comfrey, Divided and Leaves Cut Off

Put your new plants in their compost-filled holes, and water them in well.

Planting Divided Comfrey

To keep the soil from drying out, add mulch. I prefer to use alfalfa hay for mulch because it adds so much fertility to the soil. The hay will bleach almost white in the sun, so your neighbors shouldn’t mind the way it looks.

New Comfrey Under Mulch

In the photo below you can see a new plant that was planted about a month before the photo was taken. It was divided from the plant I showed you earlier. I’ve planted it along a fence-line, between an old tree stump and a new service berry tree. Trees like comfrey, because the dying leaves and root hairs feed nitrogen and minerals to the tree. Comfrey seems to enjoy a bit of shade, although it will grow in full sun, too.

Comfrey Plant

Tagged as: comfrey, compost