You know comfrey? If you do, you might roll your eyes at the very thought of having more of it in your garden. The plant can be a bit of a monster. It seems to spread if you so much as touch it, popping up here and there in the garden beds.
Yet comfrey is a wonderful plant for your garden, so it’s hard to wave goodbye to it. In fact, we should be saying hello more often than we do.
Why should you invite more comfrey to your garden?
First, it’s an excellent bee plant. When I want bees to come and visit my vegetables, I plant some comfrey in the patch. It attracts bees galore, and while they’re there they may as well pollinate my vegetables as well.
Comfrey is also an outstanding mulch plant. Spreading its copious quantities of leaves over the soil helps protect the soil from drying out completely or leaching out in the rain and snow over the winter months. Not only is comfrey good at making large amounts of vegetable matter, this matter is also very nutritious for the soil. Comfrey is a bioaccumulator. It’s good at pulling important minerals up from the soil. In particular, it accumulates calcium, magnesium, and potassium.
But isn’t removing minerals from the soil a bad quality? Not unless you throw your comfrey away. If you use it as a mulch, or better yet, work it into the compost, it will enrich your soil. Think of comfrey as a type of home-grown compost.
Comfrey also reaches way down into the soil. If you’re working in tough new soils and you’re looking for a plant to loosen the soil, comfrey will help. It has a nice, deep taproot and breaks up the soil.
Sometimes the plants that seem so persistent in the garden can have good qualities. Comfrey is one of these. Use it wisely, and it will add immeasurably to your garden’s health.
Image Credit: Ayla87