Topic: Wotta lottie day! (and a comfrey query!)

[AndyC]

Spent 8 hours at the lottie today.  Can barely move as I write this!!  Have cleared a huge patch of nettles with my new scythe ;D  Also dug another bed on my plot and collected two compost bins and their rather fine contents from, a mate who inherited them in his new house and hates gardening! 

I noticed he has a comfrey at the back of his garden and have asked him for it.  Are these plants okay to just lift and move at this time of year or should I leave it a while?  Caroline Foley advises in her books that you should get a root offset.  What is a root offset please :-\?  Can anyone help please?

Also met a new plot holder, who has taken over a jungle next to my lottie and arrived today woth a sprayer and nuked the whole lot with roundup!  Certainly looked a lot easier than the digging I've been doing! ;D

[spacehopper]

Hi Andy, can you move today?  ;)
Sounds like you are making great progress.
I think its the wrong time of year to be moving comfrey, and you would be better off waiting till spring. If you dig a plant up and wash the soil off the roots then you should be able to pull the roots apart into seperate plants. If your mate is going to be digging them up however it would be worth saving them and planting them now. Do you know what type of comfrey it is? The reason I ask is that some varieties can self seed and grow out of control, which can be a nightmare so I'm told.

[marshwiggle]

Hi Andy, I am new too.
I got my comfrey root cuttings from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. These are the ones that don't seed, I think they are called Bocking. I planted them a month ago and they are doing very well, you need to leave a good metre between them (I planted them a bit too close :-[). The root cuttings looked just like cazandbaz said, just like chopped up root. My Gran used to swear by a poultice of boiled comfrey leaves for her aching joints, so if you are digging the sooner you get a patch going the better;D

[jennym]

Plant the comfrey close to the compost heap - the roots will take up any run-off, and they are close when harvesting the leaves to put on it.

[AndyC]

Cheers guys, all good advice as usual.  No idea what variety the comfrey is but I just recognised it from one of my lottie books :-[

I will wait till spring as suggested.  I have a nice square by my compost bins where I will plant it.  And Wardy, I have put the nettles on my heap as suggetsed.  Its now two days on and I still ache so will never do that again! :-\

[supersprout]

This is Bocking comfrey on my plot, wiv the compost heap handy ;D


(with a rogue Borlotti bean among the comfrey plants ;))

[wardy]

Have you got a comfrey pipe rigged up?

[AndyC]

Supersprout, that is a fair old patch of comfrey you have there ;D  .  Does it spread much and if so how quickly?  I have a little bed by my compost bins which is separte from any veg beds and I intend to dig it over and stick the comfrey there in spring.

Wardy, please do tell, what is a comfrey pipe please, I'm still very hignorant of such things ???

[wardy]

Bocking 14 comfrey is very well behaved  :)  Have a search on here for "comfrey pipe".  The info, with instructions, was posted by Phil Cooper.  We have rigged one up for our communal lotty and peeps are fascinated by it. We won best communal plot in the Britain in Bloom Grow Your Own awards.  I think it was the pipe that swung it as the RHS judges were playing with it for ages  ;D  Basically it's a distillery for comfrey.  You pack the leaves tight into a pipe with a plastic bottle at the end.  The pipe is that plastic downpipe stuff and you can use brackets to attach it to the shed or fence post of whatever.  The leaves begin to drip liquid as they are compressed by packing them down with a bottle (old wine bottle with a string attached so you can retrieve it).  You put a demi john or some narrow necked vessel to catch the liquid (only narrow as you don't want rain in getting in it)  The resultant foul smelling liquid is diluted 15 to 20 times as a fertiliser for your food crops etc

[supersprout]

hi andyc, thank you for the compliment (curtsies ::))
These comfrey were planted three months ago from the Organic Gardening Catalogue root cuttings, so watch this space for spreadage! They seem to discourage weeds underneath, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next. I would plant them 1m apart instead of 2.5 ft next time I think, they are growing very strongly. Very well behaved indeed wardy, I don't ever catch them making comments about the state of the rest of the plot ;D