comfrey for mulch

I was successful at germinating the comfrey seeds that I received from Great Britain. My goal is to plant the comfrey around my fruit trees and chop and drop them for mulch. They will also be a food source for free range chickens once my fruit trees are bigger. I already have white clover around the trees, however I wanted a plant to keep the grass down throughout the year and I settled on comfrey as my choice. Any thoughts or ideas on my plans or perhaps suggestions for another nutrient dropping plant would be appreciated.

I think comfrey is a fantastic plant for this. Like you, I've been wondering about other dynamic accumulators to use for the same purpose. Here are some ideas I've found so far. Hopefully, others will have more ideas.

I've been planting rhubarb with the same idea, the garden gets the mulch and I get the pies.

Pacific NW - Year before last in the autumn I bought around 50 root cuttings and a few crown cuttings and heeled them into a large raised bed, well manured and well mulched . Last spring, when the plants were all nicely sprouting, I used all of them in a tree planting project to create a new orchard and to start trees growing in a paddock which should ultimately lead to a 40-60% tree canopy cover and backup fodder supply against further droughts. I am not a comfrey expert by any means, but I did quite a lot of research prior to embarking on this project. One thing I learned is that not all comfreys are the same. There are a range of natural behaviours - like bamboo, some varieties behave themselves and some go rampant. Some are deeper rooting and some are shallower rooting.

It is always worth including the name of the variety of comfrey with a short description of its expected characteristics when talking about the plant. If I had a field I wanted to turn into a mainstay of harvesting and using comfrey, I might choose a rampant variety. That's not how I want to use comfrey - my goal is to have it well behaved, stays put where I plant it, and root deep, so I can plan the harvests for particular purposes.

One of the resources that I found very helpful is Coe's Comfrey. http://coescomfrey.com/comfrey.html

Every one of the cuttings I ordered, sprouted and did well - which means I actually got more than I paid for as Coe sends extras to cover shipping.

I'll try to swing back around and report on progress of my comfrey plants once spring is underway.

Mary Combs wrote:Pacific NW - Year before last in the autumn I bought around 50 root cuttings and a few crown cuttings and heeled them into a large raised bed, well manured and well mulched . Last spring, when the plants were all nicely sprouting, I used all of them in a tree planting project to create a new orchard and to start trees growing in a paddock which should ultimately lead to a 40-60% tree canopy cover and backup fodder supply against further droughts. I am not a comfrey expert by any means, but I did quite a lot of research prior to embarking on this project. One thing I learned is that not all comfreys are the same. There are a range of natural behaviours - like bamboo, some varieties behave themselves and some go rampant. Some are deeper rooting and some are shallower rooting.

It is always worth including the name of the variety of comfrey with a short description of its expected characteristics when talking about the plant. If I had a field I wanted to turn into a mainstay of harvesting and using comfrey, I might choose a rampant variety. That's not how I want to use comfrey - my goal is to have it well behaved, stays put where I plant it, and root deep, so I can plan the harvests for particular purposes.

One of the resources that I found very helpful is Coe's Comfrey. http://coescomfrey.com/comfrey.html

Every one of the cuttings I ordered, sprouted and did well - which means I actually got more than I paid for as Coe sends extras to cover shipping.

I'll try to swing back around and report on progress of my comfrey plants once spring is underway.

Thank you for sharing this, we are looking into Coe's for some good comfrey as last years bought at a local nursery was very disappointing.

Mike Guillory wrote:I was successful at germinating the comfrey seeds that I received from Great Britain.  My goal is to plant the comfrey around my fruit trees and chop and drop them for mulch.  They will also be a food source for free range chickens once my fruit trees are bigger.

I've seen "chickens eating comfrey" mentioned a number of times, but I've had free-ranging chickens for 5-6 years and comfrey available in a planter and have *never* seen them eat any of it. Does anyone actually feed comfrey to chickens?  As far as I can tell, they won't eat it if they have alternatives.

On the Coe's comfrey site it says that chickens will relish deep rooted comfrey but ignore shallow rooted comfrey. They said this in the context of comfrey grown using manure (deep) versus comfrey grown using chemical fertilizers (shallow). If you are growing the comfrey in a confined planter, that may be the issue. The chickens are probably not going for comfrey because they like the taste, but because they are fulfilling a mineral need from minerals pulled up by the deep roots.

I have had mixed experiences of comfrey.

At my relatives place we planted some around an apple tree. It absolutely lived up to the marketing hype. It grew tall an lush. Its spreading leaves did a really good job of suppressing the grass, and the soil beneath it is rich, dark, full of worms and moist. The apple tree is thriving. At home  the same comfrey does less well. It does grow, but doesn't thrive. It doesn't suppress the grass, and the soil stays dry and friable.

I think the key difference is climate and soil type.

Where it grows well they get more year round rain, and the water table is near the surface. It really thrives under those conditions. At my place we have fast draining chalk soil and tend to have drier summers. I'm intending to set up a better and more consistent irrigation system in that area this year. I'll be interested to see how it affects the comfrey growth.

Michael touched on this but...

If you planted from seeds you're going to get the "running wild" almost invasive sort of Comfrey, assuming it likes your area.
If that's what you want, then OK.

The Bocking 4 and 14 comfries were specifically bred to be sterile seed-wise (they still flower) so they don't run wild.
They only propagate from root cuttings.