Good day and welcome back to the Weeder Garden, the lovely garden on the hill. Another beautiful day here, and on this video, we're going to be talking about comfrey, this amazing plant. When I first started my Weeder Garden here a few years ago, one of the first plants that people

were asking me if I grew was comfrey, and there's a reason why, because comfrey is an amazing plant. And on this video, I got L again to visit, and I'm going to tell you what you can do with comfrey in the garden and how you can get all the

goodness out of it for your plants. And L, she's going to tell us all the amazing medicinal qualities that this plant has for our bodies. It's an amazing healing plant. It's called knitbone, if you haven't heard of that. That's an

obvious name for a plant that's really good to heal your bones. When I say the words comfrey, it reminds me of being free. It's like saying 'come and be free.' Comfrey is one of the best plants you can have in your garden. And now I know a

little bit more about comfrey, I know exactly why it's a popular plant. See, it's got this long taproot that goes really deep into the ground, and that collects all the minerals that all these other plants on top can't get. You see, and it

brings those minerals up and brings them out and puts them in the leaves. And that's why these leaves are so amazing. A plant like this, they call it also an accumulator. All right, accumulator, that means that it accumulates organic material and organic mass, and it's a

really good idea to plant them around your fruit trees like see I've got my little Brazilian cherry tree here and I've got this all this comfrey growing around the base of it one it stops the weeds coming up and the tap roots are going way down deep there so they're not

sort of competing with the nutrients from my Brazilian cherry tree and secondly it's a little living compost see if you look in here you can see these are the nice fresh green leaves good for the medicine and good for the compost and and making tea out of it I'm not talking

about the tea that we drink cuz it's not good for you you don't want to have comfrey tea the comfrey tea is like the fertilizer we make for the garden you don't want to eat comfrey leaves or you don't want to drink comfrey tea that's

important but if you look down here underneath here you see these dry leaves see these old leaves these are the ones that just going to turn into soil right and so the little microorganisms that are living down there they're going to try to break that

down and feed it to my Brazilian cherry tree all right see comfrey leaves that come in all sizes see little ones like that to huge big ones like this one here [Music] so if you got comfrey growing around your plants you don't have weeds growing

around your plants but another really good thing it's for is over here look fresh comfrey leaves they'll lay more eggs and they're good for the chickens cuz they've got a lot of vitamin B12 and a lot of vitamin A and protein and that's a protein I guess

that makes them want to lay more eggs if I just pull this pull this out see that see all those long roots they're the ones that go down and this plant here's probably only been in the ground for a month or 6 weeks I'll give this handful to El so

she can make some salad okay see put this in the ground it's like a little chicken foot see that see I got another one there probably make that into two actually see I can chuck that in the ground that definitely come that definitely come get have a guess how

many I could make out of this have a guess I could probably make about 50 all right all I need is a little bit like 3 centimeters long as big as my little finger but probably for you as big as your thumb cuz I'm a big fella that's all you need

see like that and I'll just get a bunch of these and I'll just go and plant them around the bottom of my fig tree and that'll eventually stop all these weeds coming up so I'm going to just kind of clear a little area little circle and

I'm just going to drop these in in like that just going to put them all around here like that and then I'm just going to get some soil and put a little circle of soil on top I just give them a little bit of water cuz it's not going to rain for

another week or so here up in the Wy Garden so when you just put the little roots in the ground you got to make sure they don't dry out so just keep the water up to them until they start to establish set and forget they're

actually going to just power and overtake all the other weeds there so moving right along and here we go we're several months later and we've got comfrey coming up all over the place down here see it's kind of surrounding the whole fig tree little bit of grass still

finding its way through there but this is nice got to be careful not to pull the roots out because it's so little lots of figs on this tree at the moment too we had a hail storm here few days ago it just wow so the comfrey does look a bit

battered at the moment okay I'm just going to stick a couple of my comfrey down next to my wormwood there we go all right before we go over to Ill I'm just going to show you quickly how to make the comfrey tea the most simplest and easiest thing

to do is make comfrey tea not to drink internally only for your garden you see I've got the comfrey leaves chopped up about 3/4 full and I just fill it up with water I use creek water nice and pure from the sky rain water

I wouldn't I wouldn't use town water if you can avoid it cuz I think town water's got things in it that's going to kill the bacteria and you want this to breed bacteria you can make it with lactobacillus bacteria and molasses and

make those beautiful concoctions that I've done previously on my channel or you can just leave it like this with water and let it sit for if it's winter like it is now probably 6 weeks but in the summer time when it's a bit warmer

you can just let it sit for 3 weeks so 3 to 6 weeks and you'll know when it's ready cuz it'll stink it'll be kind of all sludgy and gluggy and and it'll smell really bad and so you might be

thinking how I'm going to use this well you can use it straight up for your fruit trees or you can water it down 50/50 with water just like this to the trees and in the vegetable garden this is like 50/50 water just like

that comfrey loves to have the Sun so a good sunny position is good for comfrey but it will tolerate the shade as well grows pretty much everywhere and I've got it down in my swales in the shade it's also growing in the sun and the leaves

are just as big as each other whether it's in the Sun or in the shade it's an extremely hardy plant and it'll grow in most soils it's especially useful for heavy clay soils to break up the clay and mine the minerals down deep in the

soil it doesn't need much love it'll take care of itself and it'll thrive comfrey is a hearty perennial and a comes from Europe and Asia and where I am here in the wider garden it's subtropical so the plant will grow all year round but

if you're living in a climate where you get a cold Winters and frosts the leaves will die off during the winter time but the root will stay alive in the ground and come back in the spring time so that's the comfrey tea That's the plant in

the comfrey okay so I'll hand you over to El now and she can talk about the medicinal qualities of comfrey thanks sweetie so that's all about the garden but now let's talk about the medicine for the body so what we want to do with comfrey is we will use

the aerial parts externally for our body so back in the day people used to drink comfrey tea but recently they've found a whole heap of research to say that it's really carcinogenic cuz there's alkaloids inside it that can really damage your liver and make you quite

sick so my advice to you is probably give it a miss you don't really need it so comfrey is good for bruises and sprains and breaks uh it's called knit bones so what it does is it actually knits bones back together that have been

broken so we also use it for osteoarthritis and any sort of joint injuries or deep tissue problems um for example my kids play soccer when they get a massive big bruise on their legs or something like that I will make a nice poultice or salve and then on goes

the comfrey and then within a couple of days it's good comfrey helps with cell regeneration and it also helps to fight inflammation and help reduce pain now imagine Wendy's elbow I'm going to show you how to make a poultice that will

help so all you really need is chopping board some comfrey leaves a big knife and a bandage you just kind of want to dice it up you want to make it all small pieces and kind of squishy now if you want you can put some a little bit of oil in it

to help it stick so oh it's hurting a lot just in my elbow I'll just get all this comfrey and put on my elbow and I'll just hold it and uh there we go look at that see hang on hang on squashing my fingers in

there you want the comfrey there I'll hold that excellent and um like this garden garden first day garden first a that's my hat is in the way right and we'll just fast forward like a little nice little bow on it nice yeah so this is good for an adult so

adults are generally okay with like if there's a or osteoarthritis or some sort of like serious joint pain adults are like yeah fine no worries I'll I'll use the poultice it's a little bit messy and sometimes kids can go e I'm not putting

that on me I think what you're saying there's another way to do it as well there's another way to do it as well okay so I'm going to teach you guys now how to do a more kid-friendly version which is a compress so let's try that

we're making a herbal compress now so this is very similar to just making a very strong tea so you get your comfrey or chopped up put it in to a glass bowl or something that'll withstand the boiling hot water heat you then put in the

boiling water it's making it nice and covered you can see just how much plant matter there is to actual water there so you just sort of want to have it to the top of the plant matter and then we leave it for 20 minutes to infuse and we'll

notice it'll gradually change color to take on a lot of the plant's property so it should turn out a nice green color comfrey is full of allantoin allantoin accelerates cellular mitosis which just means that it speeds up the growth of

new tissues comfrey is really anti-inflammatory and that's because of the rosmarinic acid in the leaves and the reason that it actually reduces the pain is because it's reducing the inflammation in the injury so with comfrey you don't really want to use

them on big deep open wounds because the comfrey will cause cell regeneration so quickly that the outer layers of skin will actually heal but underneath will still be damaged it can cause abscesses and things like that so we don't want to put on anything that's like big or deep

or open so comfrey is not really suitable for people with liver disease or on medications that affect the liver it's also not recommended for people that have any sort of alcoholism if you have a damaged liver you don't want to be using comfrey because it could also

damage your liver further so women that are pregnant or breastfeeding aren't recommended to have comfrey either you really want to make sure that you're using fresh comfrey and changing it every day so that you've got that fresh plant matter to put onto the wound the

next day so while we're sitting here waiting for the tea to get ready just want to explain there's another way a more simple way to do this all right and that's just basically to put it on you can feel this the spiky things in your

arm, but I've got a pretty strong skin, so it doesn't bother me. But little kids might not like that spiky feeling, that's why you chop it up into small pieces. It doesn't spike as much cuz those little hairs that I showed you before, all right. 

But the little hairs is the ones that do the goodness and do the the healing part, all right. All right, to do the tea, it's not too hot, nice, not going to burn you putting like that, okay. It's the is ow, we want to bandage

Yep, bandage out, it's like that. See that's the tea cloth, you see how messy we are. It's nice and warm as well actually cuz Ah, that's better. My poor old wrist that's hurting, and they should help with your inflammation, yeah, stops it getting all swollen.

Thanks for doing my wrist. Oh, you're welcome. So it's really important that before you put comfrey on a broken bone, you make sure there reset in place where it's actually meant to be again. So maybe after a trip to the doctor or after someone has put a joint back in, you make

sure that you then put comfrey on after it's ready to be reset. If you can leave it on for up to 6 hours and then take it off, go again. You can also make salves out of these, can't you? You can make salves out of any sort of H herbs, yep.

Yeah, do you reckon we should make a video on salves? Let's make a comfrey video. Okay, we'll do that on the next video. The next video that El comes to the garden, we'll show you how to make a salve. I actually got an idea, you could probably

have a whole comfy bath imagine if you're on a ski holiday and you go tumbling down the mountain and you like aches and pains all over the body I'd come home and I'd light the fire underneath the bathtub and I'd fill up

with comfrey leaves and let it sit and warm up there for a few hours and I take the leaves out and just lay in that whole bathtub of comfy tea and I probably feel a whole lot better we had a good time up in the garden I feel like

a bit of a demonstration model but I hope you got the gist of it and um and to sort of understand how easy it actually is to make your own medicine in your garden I think it's really cool to have your own medicine right at your back door especially if you live far

away from any town and even further from the city it's good to have it right on hand thanks very much for coming and sharing it all with us hey you're more than welcome thanks for having me always it's always had a good time in the

garden say Enjoy your Gardens and enjoy your lives remember cuz no one else owns you have a nice day and I'll catch you on the next video see you from the Wy Garden [Music]

WHY COMFREY IS A MIRACLE PLANT

WHY COMFREY IS A MIRACLE PLANT

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