Please choose "Combination or Custom" shipping at checkout. Cost of shipping is $9.90 for 1-6 roots, $14.90 for 7-20 roots, $19.90 for 21-60 roots, 61 or more roots--Actual shipping. If you order more than just roots your shipping could be more.
Bocking 14 cultivar of Russian Comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum) --The roots and leaves contain the valuable cell-proliferant allantoin. Salve speeds healing quite noticeably. Contains PAs. By popular vote here at Horizon Herbs, the most useful medicinal plant in our entire garden (see my book "Making Plant Medicine" for more on this). Besides making medicine from the dried root, we use the leaves for curing our goats of any intestinal ailment, which as you may know intestinal ailments can often prove fatal to goats. Furthermore, we have great results making the fresh leaves into biodynamic tea, which we apply to our plants in a pot to increase vitality, growth, and to green up all those leaves! Excellent ingredient for compost piles--fresh leaves compost fast and make a nitrogen-rich compost! Organic, farm-derived, vegetarian and free of cost.
How do I plant it? You take the cutting out of the bag of moist coir and plant it with the roots down in the ground and the crown up toward the light. Firm the soil around the cutting and leave a bit of the crown and any leaves up out of the soil and in the light. Water it after you transplant it. Comfrey is not only a cell proliferant to human or animal tissue, it is a cell proliferant to its OWN tissue, so it will grow agreeably fast. If you get several cuttings, plant them from 1 to 2 feet apart, in regular garden soil, in the full sun to part shade. Comfrey will suffer if it gets too dry, so water it weekly, at least. Plant anytime ground can be worked. Comfrey is shipped in all seasons, so please wait to order until your ground is prepared, or be ready with soil and pots if your ground is frozen.
Can I plant it in a pot? Comfrey doesn't do well in pots for an extended period, but it will survive in a pot for awhile. Don't overwater, and keep the plant in the light and give it sandy soil mixed with compost in a gallon or larger pot. It will try to send a root out the drainage hole of the pot and find some real dirt.
What's the difference between this plant and true comfrey (Symphytum officinalis)? The Bocking 14 cultivar of Russian Comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum) is a sterile hybrid that will not self-seed and is extremely robust and vigorous. The true comfrey (Symphytum officinalis) is a bit less vigorous of a grower, has more elongated leaves and (I think) prettier flowers, and does indeed make seed. Although both types of comfrey (Russian and True) are useful for making medicine and making compost, in an ideal world one would use the bocking cultivar for producing large amounts of biomass for permaculture gardens, composting, and animal feed, and one would use the true comfrey (Symphytum officinalis) for medicinal purposes. Again, both types (and other species as well) are used interchangeably in agriculture and in medicine.
I have a whole antimastitis program that involves keeping the udders drained of milk as much as possible and giving hot epsom salt soaks with a terrycloth directly on the udder and then drying udder and rubbing poke oil on the udder, clearing up the nastiest mastitis in a couple of days, fully herbal, again see my book "making plant medicine." If you see blood clots in the milk when you filter it watch out--run a preemptive mastitis program before its too late!
The whole PA thing is absurd and comfrey is perfectly safe for livestock and humans as long as its given as part of a whole diet. You could probably exhibit stress factors if you gave exclusively comfrey, or exclusively anything else for that matter. Do NOT however give the plant to pregnant females. Check my book MAking Plant Medicine under comfrey for a level-headed assessment of all this.
Goat's Rue is used in Europe all the time to boost lactation and it works a treat. It is not harmful. I've checked this with the main european phytotherapists.
As for the farm plan you simply get started growing the plants and you see how often you really use them and how much they produce and then fine-tune your agricultural plan accordingly. Yield of these plants is fully dependent on your environment and how good you are at growing plants. I concentrate on growing a few good plants not many uncared for plants and get plenty for my needs and for the needs of my most exhalted goat buddies of which I have only 2 left right now and they're getting old.
