How-To Easily Propagate Comfrey

Propagating comfrey is fast and easy! Comfrey is considered by

many to be one of the essential permaculture/homestead plants. It has so many uses on the homestead that it easy to defend that viewpoint. From powerful medicinal, to plentiful animal fodder, and soil conditioner/compost activator, comfrey literally does it all! Comfrey is relatively simple to propagate. Back towards the end of May I did some root cuttings from a couple of starts that I put in pots back in February.

As an aside, the only time you should really put a comfrey plant in a pot would be specifically for root propagation. Comfrey develops a deep tap root so it really isn’t suited for life in a pot. The pots just makes getting the root cuttings super simple and convenient. Potting them up like this a great way to get a lot of cuttings fast! Using this technique you can really ramp up comfrey production quickly.

Anyway I finally got start to finish photo documentation of the entire process from initial separation to cuttings pushing up leaves. So here we go:

Comfrey root propagation — The tools of the trade for propagating comfrey from root cuttings. Wheelbarrow (to hold the soil from the pots), digging fork (for mixing soil), hand pruners for making the cuttings.

Comfrey in pots — These are the initial comfrey plants that I was working with. They were started from purchased cuttings two month prior.

The first step is to trim the leaves from the plant. Leave about an inch or so of stem to start with. You should end up with quite a few leaves, my chickens loved them but you could just compost them also. After trimming the leaves I dumped the plant into the wheelbarrow and cleaned the soil off of the root ball.

Here is one of the root masses all cleaned up and ready to go! Keep in mind these are only two months old. They started out as a root cutting about two inches long.

Here’s the other root ball cleaned up and ready to take cuttings off of.

Root cuttings from comfrey — Here I cut the roots into pieces ranging from two inches for nice fat pieces to about three and a half inches for spindly, skinny chunks. From the two plants I was able to get in the neighborhood of forty root cuttings plus two nice big crowns.

Comfrey crown in pot — After making all of the cuttings I amended the potting soil with some rabbit manure compost and bio-char, then replanted the crowns into the pots. The crown is the piece of root at the very top of the mass that the leaves sprout from. This is a very robust potion of the cutting, and bounces back from the trauma of this process quickly.

Comfrey growing back from crown — Here’s the same crown after about a week. The longest leaf is about two inches long at this point. The crowns are the quickest portion of the cutting to come back into production

So there you go: from starting out with two inch cuttings in Feb, making the cuttings in May, and now the plants are ready to be propagated again in July. I have little comfrey plants popping up all over in my garden and under the trees, and I’m getting ready to do some more next week. I think this time I’ll share cuttings with whoever wants some, and maybe run the crown through for a third round! Comfrey is super simple to propagate and a prolific producer of a multitude of homestead and garden products. It just makes you wonder why there isn’t comfrey growing on every homestead!

One thing to remember when planting your cuttings is that since it is so easily propagated by root cuttings you want to put it someplace where you will not be tilling. Another simple way to spread comfrey is to just rototill through a plant or two, and the next year you’ll go from a couple plants to a nice big patch. I guess that might be why comfrey isn’t on every homestead, it can get out of control if you don’t manage it correctly.

Resources:

Comfrey root cuttings (grow your own!): click here