Comfrey - the miracle plant?

If you have any interest in permaculture or regenerative farming/gardening, chances are you’ve heard many miraculous things about Comfrey. For instance: The deep roots ‘mine’ for nutrients and collect them in the leaves/it’s a biodynamic accumulator! It is a fabulous forage plants for livestock/chickens love it! You can brew a nutrient-dense/though extremely smelly compost tea with it! It can be used to cure cuts and bruises! … and many more. Go ahead, search ‘comfrey permaculture’ on Google and see whatcha get. I’ll wait.

Whenever something has these kinds of inflated claims, I am suspicious. It happens regularly in the gardening world (coffee grounds and eggshells, anyone?). Let's get one thing straight: plants are miraculous, period. Take a carrot seed. It’s unbelievably tiny. Within its microscopic proportions, it has everything it needs to send down roots and produce cotyledon leaves, which provide enough photosynthate to make those huge feathery fronds and develop a long, fat, juicy, orange, delicious tap root. This is simply crazy. Or how about the tomato flower, which is self-pollinating? It has everything it needs, both male and female parts, to produce fruit by itself - it doesn’t need the services of a pollinator. Or the humble bean, which allows a bacteria in the soil to colonize on its roots in order to take nitrogen from the air and provide it to the plant. Or the hormone in all plants called auxin, which is produced in the stem and root tips that cause the elongation of the plant? I mean. You can’t look at plants and not see how miraculous they are, doing things that we didn’t engineer them to do; they’ve simply evolved to do them over millions of years. Comfrey is no different.

Comfrey is in the Borage family, and we’ve already sung the praises of the flowers in this family. They are very attractive to bees (carpenter bees in particular), though I have also noticed hummingbirds love the bell-shaped comfrey flowers too. And they are lovely little inflorescences, in a curled shape called a ‘cyme.’ A cyme is a curved stalk of flowers; the terminal bud flowers first, and the others further down and underneath flower afterwards. The leaves are winged, with the wings going down a large part of the petiole, or stem, of the leaf. As you can see, the leaves can get quite large, up to two feet long.

You start comfrey from a root cutting. No special treatment is needed. Just cut some of the root out (which doesn’t hurt the existing plant at all), and bury it. Soon you’ll have a plant. By its second year of life, it’s ready to be ‘harvested,’ if you want to go that route. If not, the plant’s leaves will slowly sort of keel over to the sides, like flowers in a vase, and new leaves will come up from the center. It tends to die back in frost or cold, and re-sprouts reliably every year.

The added benefit of comfrey lies in its ability to be ‘chopped’ down several times a season, and it will come right back. Why would you want to do this? There’s value in the leaves. Like all leaves, comfrey’s have a lot of nutrients in them. After all, that is how trees (and many other plants) fertilize themselves; they drop their leaves to the ground to decompose and provide nutrients over time. Comfrey leaves have a pleasant nutrient ratio of about 3-1-5. That means it’s a pretty good fertilizer. You can add them to your compost, especially if you have a lot of ‘brown’ in your pile like dead leaves or bark; the nitrogen in the leaves will help the compost break down faster (just like grass clippings will). You can feed them to your chickens (apparently they also have a lot of calcium, so that is nice for your egg-producing birds), but they will likely snack on them rather indifferently, not inhale them like they do kale. Comfrey leaves are fuzzy, like borage, and kind of hurt your hands and, I imagine, livestock mouths. You can also use them as a mulch, which is what I did with my latest batch - I put them around a bed of tomatoes.

As for the claim that the deep taproot of comfrey ‘mines’ the soil for minerals: That’s kind of a fallacy. Taproots are generally formed to help anchor the large up-top biomass of the plant. Only really large plants get them, and sometimes not even then. It’s also used as a place to store the sugar and carbohydrate that the plant gains from photosynthesis (that’s what makes carrots so delicious!). Most plants get their water and nutrients from surface roots, which are in the top 3-8 inches of soil, pretty shallow.

And please, for the love of God, do not make the kind of comfrey compost tea everyone suggests on the forums. They tell you to put comfrey leaves in a bucket, weigh them down with a brick, fill the bucket with water, cover it, then let it sit for 3-6 weeks! There’s a reason it smells so bad when you open the bucket, and it’s called anaerobic bacteria! Anything anaerobic is not going to be healthy on your soil or your plants. One reason compost is successful is because it’s aerobic and full of oxygen!

There is some evidence that comfrey is a good plant to have around for bee stings, cuts, inflammation, and muscle soreness. To quote the NCBI: “Comfrey has a centuries-old tradition as a medicinal plant. Today, multiple randomized controlled trials have demonstrated the efficacy and safety of comfrey preparations for the topical treatment of pain, inflammation and swelling of muscles and joints in degenerative arthritis, acute myalgia in the back, sprains, contusions and strains after sports injuries and accidents, also in children aged 3 or 4 and over.” You can see their paper for more information about the clinical trials that have been conducted.

So grow comfrey for its beauty and its value for pollinators, and use it for mulch or compost if you feel so inclined. It can’t hurt to have it around for topical pain relief or to ease swelling. And it is a great plant to put under fruit trees and in neglected parts of your garden. It will spread easily, so be warned that if you dig it up and cut the roots, you could have plants everywhere (and it reseeds - another particularly borage-like trait). But it’s a pretty plant, so that might not be a bad thing!

Mushroom ID: Will it ever be Straightforward???

I am continually fascinated by, and equally frustrated by, the process of mushroom ID. Wintertime is our mushroom time, as that's when we get the rain - it's dry 8-9 months of the year here in inland Northern CA. So when we get a good rain, boy, that's when the fruiting bodies of these fungi finally pop up, creating such a beautiful display all over the garden. Some are in leaves, some are in soil, but the overwhelming amount I  find are growing in the wood chips we have all covering all the pathways and perennial beds. 

The pictures here today are all from one cluster, found in a shadier part of the garden, under Chinese pistache trees and Ceanothus. The mushrooms are not growing out of the leaves, however - they are growing out of the woodchips.

You'd think identification of these would be easy - they're NOT 'little brown mushrooms' (or LBM's, as they're known in the mycology world). These are a glorious orange. But when I plucked a few out and went to my trusty mushroom book (California Mushrooms: The Comprehensive Identification Guide), just knowing the color alone did not help. Nor did the fact that they were growing on wood chips. It was really getting the spore print that helped me to identify this mushroom.

It's easy to do a spore print - just take the stem (or stipe) off the mushroom and place it gills-down on a piece of paper. Cover it with a container to keep it from drying out too quickly, and leave it overnight. In the morning you will have a good idea of the color of the spore. In this case, the spore was a very similar color to the mushroom, but that isn't always the case. For instance, chanterelles are deep yellow mushrooms with light-colored spore. 

Once I had this spore color, I could begin to key out my species. Do you know about Botanical Keys? They are kind of like a flow chart to determine what it is you are looking at. They are also called Dichotomous Keys. On paper, they can be many many pages long. One of the questions on my lab practical for Terminology was to key out to plant family. The instructor had a plant sitting there that was in bloom. We had to take a flower and dissect it to determine all its parts, and then key it out. It was not as easy as you would think and a lot of folks had trouble with it. Some books, like my mushroom book, include a key at the very beginning to get you to the genus of mushroom that you are looking for. Then there are keys in each spore color group, so if you know the spore color, you can go right to that key. It's an interesting process. 

Of course there are terms that I had to look up, like the aforementioned 'stipe,' plus things like adnexed or adnate, decurrent or subdecurrent, etc. Yikes. 

I found a nice online keying system for mushrooms that got me to the right genus, too - but it is very east-coast centered, so I had to find the correct west-coast version in my book. This system is called MycoKeys. I thought this was a nice way to figure this mushroom out if there isn't a field guide handy. (For an interesting example of an online botanical key, check out this one from the UK.)

Anyway, after fiddling around with these dang mushrooms for two days, I think I have my ID. I believe these orange mushrooms are Pholiota malicola var. macropoda. Unfortunately, the edibility of this particular mushroom is 'unknown.' So I guess we won't be eating them anytime soon. Still, this was a useful exercise in recognizing and identifying mushrooms. The problem is, I probably won't remember this. And then I'll have to do it all again next year.

How are you at ID'ing fungus? Do you enjoy doing it? Do you ever get GOOD at it? Are you one of those knowledgable people who can forage for edible fungi? And if so, are you willing to take me under your wing? :)

The Leaf Project

Nearly every winter, I call around to the tree companies, or scour the neighborhood looking for the tree trucks, trying to get a load of free wood chips. Eventually I source them, the guys come in their big truck, and they drop 20 cubic yards of fresh wood chips in our driveway. Then Tom and I spend the next month with the wheelbarrow and shovel, moving all those chips around to the pathways in between our raised beds, and around the perennial plantings that border the gardens. It's always a slog, because it takes so darn long. Blisters abound. We can't park in our driveway for weeks. Often gates are blocked. Honestly, it's always wonderful for the garden (and yeah, ok, for our waistlines), but hard on the middle-aged humans who tend it.

It's necessary though, if I want to keep weeds from germinating all over the place. I've written here before that we don't have a lot of weeds, and we really don't. By that I mean, not much comes in with the wind or the birds. Oh, a stray purslane here (likely brought in on nursery stock), or a wayward willowherb there, but nothing very troublesome. Most of our 'weeds' are simply seeds from our trees. The Catalpa and the Pepper trees are notorious for sprouting all over the place. And the squirrels plant oak trees everywhere. 

And, this year, I brought in organic straw from a local farm to mulch the summer veg, which was great, but there were a LOT of wheat seeds left in it. And now wheat is sprouting up everywhere, all the places I DON'T want it. Like on the paths. Usually a thick layer of fresh wood chips, every winter, keeps everything manageable. 

But - this year I decided to do something different. 

The "North Garden" here at Poppy Corners.

I told you how I've been picking up coffee chaff from the roasters in Emeryville (Highwire Coffee), and they also have tons of burlap and jute bags to give away. So, I brought home about 100 bags and lined every pathway with them (they are completely biodegradable). Then I put out an all-points bulletin in my neighborhood: I wanted leaves. Some folks would call me after their mow-and-blow service came, and I'd go pick up several bags. Some neighbors would fill up their green waste cans, then wheel the can over and I'd dump them in the yard. Some folks needed help raking and sweeping leaves, so I did that too. It took a couple weeks, but I've finally got every square inch of this garden covered. Well, not the raised beds part. Those get green manures, or cover crops, and compost every spring. But the rest of the garden is covered in a nice thick layer of leaves - sycamore, tulip poplar, valley oak, tallow, red maple, liquidambar - I've got a cornucopia of different leaves on every path. Springy and soft, these leaves will slowly break down through the winter, feeding the soil life underground, and providing lots of nutrients to my garden. 

Time will tell how well this leaf layer suppresses weeds, though - I'm already seeing a few stray wheat sprouts come up, sigh.