hey guys todd here with great escape farms today i'm going to talk about comfrey it is a plant with the at least uh partial name of some phytum is a perennial herb that grows leaves two to three feet tall and has bell-shaped flowers and we'll get a look at a close-up look at some flowers here in just a minute it is a dynamic accumulator and that is part of the reason why it is so well liked in permaculture uh dynamic accumulator means that it mines and collects a number of nutrients that other plants can't get to it has a tap root that can go up to 10 feet down in the soil and it mines for the nutrients and it brings those up and it uses it in its leaves and then because it is a deciduous uh not deciduous but it is a herd that loses its leaves and dies back to the ground every year even if left alone it will it mines and brings those nutrients up to the top because the leaves will fall and break down in the in the fall time frame and over the winter and i'll make those bio available to other plants uh what i do and what many other people do is they trim these off at the ground or not at the ground about two to three inches above the ground and use the leaves you can either use it for a fertilizer or you can take the leaves and just put it around other plants as a mulch and once you do that it makes it available to whatever plant you have a lot of times you'll find these planted around other flowers and other fruiting trees because the high nitrogen and high potassium really helps those plants out so let's get a real quick look here at the bell-shaped flowers these are somewhat of a pinkish color you might find some comfrey that is white you have to be careful with comfrey those flowers and can turn to seeds and become invasive but there are two varieties that are not so they have a number of different different names and numbers so backing and a number afterwards well uh baching is a town near the guy who was trying to perfect these uh backing four and backing 14 are considered sterile plants they will not propagate via seed and i'll show you in a little while how to actually propagate these via root cuttings either in this video or another video but they will not propagate via seeds so that prevents them from being overly invasive and again that is what the seed looks or that is what the flower looks like right there the seeds or the leaves here are this one is maybe eight eight inches long they can grow up to two to three feet long and i do have some bigger ones myself these are kind of cramped in here i just had a a space that i was filling and this is kind of my comfrey garden bed if you will where i'm just kind of growing them for propagation hey guys i'm here to make some comfrey minora tea today and what that involves is basically taking some comfrey plant cutting it up and putting it into a bucket with water and then letting it sit for anywhere from 20 days or three weeks to six weeks and just letting it rot in the water and after it's done rotting you mix it at least fifty to one so you don't you want at least fifty percent added water to it so you don't burn the plants and then you just put it around the base of the plants and comfrey is high in nitrogen and potassium which is two of the three components in your commercial fertilizers and it's all natural organic to do it that way so the process for doing that is just take a bucket grab a pair of scissors or something cut your comfrey shove it in a bucket and fill it up with water so we're going to go about three quarters of the way up on the bucket and i'm going to go ahead and do that real quick i'll stop the video go ahead and do that real quick and then i'll meet up with you when i'm starting to add water and moving on to the next steps okay so at this point we are about three quarters full here maybe a little bit more than that and what i did is i trimmed off the stems the leaves the flowers everything goes in it doesn't matter it's all gonna rot down and turn into some wonderful fertilizer for us so once you get it three quarters full then you add water and we'll go ahead and fill it up with water now so i got my hose here all set to go fill this up and this stuff is going to stink to high heaven while it's rotting and it's going to attract flies and everything else unless we cover it up so we need to make absolutely sure that it's covered up and we're not letting that smell get all over and even when it is covered uh depending on what cover you're using you'll still get some of it out so also while i'm filling this up with water the leaves are going to want to float so we're going to want to weight the leaves down a little i cram them in here kind of tight so they're not doing too bad yet but they'll eventually pop up to the top so i am about an inch away from the top to keep the leaves down so that they stay under the water i'm just going to take a rock and lay it right on top and that will hold them underneath now to keep the smell down i'm gonna go ahead and i don't have any actual lids for five gallon buckets so i'm just going to lay a plastic garbage sack over top and wrap it around with a bungee cord and there we go so that will keep any bugs or anything my biggest issue is not so much the flies i mean flies are an issue for everybody but i have a lot of mosquitoes in this area and i don't want to create another mosquito breeding ground so by covering this up it'll keep the mosquitoes out i'm also because i have so many things going on constantly here i'm going to go ahead and take a sharpie and rate on top comfrey tea and also put today's date 8 4 16 so that i remember when i put this in so i need at least three weeks and up to six weeks for this to sit in here and to rot i'm kind of late in the year to do this but i'm doing it for video purposes generally you're going to do this early in the year you put it on your plants your fruit trees and your vegetables and stuff from the time they flower up until you're actually harvesting fruit and remember to put the you do at least a 50 50 mixture of water to comfrey and you don't want to put the concrete on the actual leaves within a month of harvest so the general safe thing to do is just go ahead and put it around the root system and let it soak in that way so that's it for comfrey tea we'll let this sit for three to six weeks and look and see what it looks like this will actually turn black and like i say smell to high heaven and that's it for now please okay quick update on the conquer here we are at day let's see august 15th so we're at day 11. this has been cooking here and it smells wretched and you can see that my rock fell off and i'm kind of doing a little fermenting there if i had a stick around actually i do that stick right here next to me let's see if we can do oh good god that stuff stinks go ahead and give it a quick stir so i could actually use this in about another two weeks or so and it's definitely rotting and oh man it smells like i say very very wretched it's like nasty poo so we'll go ahead and cover this back up and check it in a couple more weeks okay i just wanted to show you this real quick today is september 7th so i'm a little over a month since i trimmed the coffee for the concrete and it is right here and if you look it's just sprouted out and grown all over the place it's a little bit wilted because we have an unusual heat wave going right now and it needs a little bit of water but it's it did not suffer at all from taking the cuttings for concrete so i'm gonna go ahead and shut this down move over and set up on the tripod so i can show you the conferee tee and actually show you how to mix it up okay so i'm standing here in front of the concrete this is september 7th so we are at about five weeks and i'm gonna go ahead and uncover this and let me try to move this over a little bit closer and i don't know if you can see that but this is got a little bit of mold and all kinds of other nasty looking stuff a little bit of algae on it and we are going to give that a stir and use it up so i have a branch right here if you recall from earlier in this video my rock fell off so it's down at the bottom you can see it's all rotted up here and i said all i was reviewing the video i also noticed that i said at one point a fifth you don't want it more than a 50 to one ratio it should be uh you don't want more than 50 percent of the concrete tea mixed with water so i'm going to do i don't know maybe a 20 mixture here and the way i do that is to just simply take some and bump it splash in your face and oh this stuff smells nasty and i try to keep it at just the liquid here so i'm sitting in about 20 percent fill it up with water and the remaining plant material that's in the uh bucket from the original mixture here go ahead and add that to your compost pile and it'll mix up and uh be a good inoculant and a good starter for your compost pile so i'll fill this about three quarters up so i can manage it right there i'm sorry i need to take cover this up because this is just horrible smelling stuff okay give this a quick stir and at this point we are ready to go out and fertilize some plants so just take and dump that around the root area you don't want anything like this to actually get on fruit or anything that you're getting ready to harvest it's going to be loaded with bacteria and stuff good bacteria for plants but just not stuff you want to be eating right away so try to get it around the roots itself and not splashing up on the plants too much so that's it for this video uh thank you very much for tuning in this is todd with great escape farms please consider subscribing to our youtube channel and also check out our blog post on greatestgatefarms.com we have an email list there if you sign up for that we'll let you know about sales that we're having at our nursery and we also have a podcast that you can get to from greaterskatefarms.com so thank you very much and have a great day