Comfrey: an Essential Plant for Preppers

Hubby Dear and our kidlets just returned from a road trip, the highlight of which was the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company's Spring Planting Festival. We weren't the only ones who trekked out to rural Missouri for the festival. As we were leaving, I took this photo of the line of cars waiting to get in.

Traffic Jam! 

I kid you not, the cars extended a mile down the gravel road.

The Planting Festival was definitely worth the dusty drive. I had several items that I wanted to find for sale among the vendors and I managed to get most of them. I was most excited about my new comfrey plants.

My three new comfrey plants waiting to be planted

I hadn't really heard of comfrey until I started learning more about permaculture and organic gardening. Comfrey is rather nondescript looking, but don't be fooled by its plain appearance. It is wonderful stuff and if you have any sort of garden space at all, you need to plant some. Here are a few of the reasons. 

Comfrey in the garden and orchard: 

-First of all, comfrey is a dynamic accumulator. It naturally pulls potassium, calcium, magnesium deep out of the ground and accumulates those elements in its tissues. If you compost comfrey leaves, you'll have an easy, sustainable way to add these nutrients to your garden.

-Comfrey makes an awesome mulch. It grows so vigorously that you can cut it back several times a year. You can then take the leaves and use them wherever you need mulch. It also acts as a living mulch and will suppress grass in the area around it.

-Comfrey's thick, powerful roots break up hard clay. That alone is enough to recommend it to me! It can dramatically improve soil just by its mere presence. Michael Phillips describes how the soil around comfrey plants will turn dark brown or even black with organic matter.

-Bees love comfrey blossoms. The blooms will attract all sorts of beneficial insects to your garden.

-Comfrey leaves make a powerful tonic for plants when brewed into a tea. The man I bought the comfrey from at the Planting Festival told me that he ferments the leaves and sprays the resulting tea on his plants whenever they need a pick-me-up. The results are dramatic.

-Fruit tree roots love comfrey for all of the reasons I've already listed, plus it assists the all-important mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi are an essential partner for fruit tree health.

- Comfrey is easy to propagate from root divisions. I only bought three comfrey plants, but they will multiply to many in just a few years. Whatever you do, make sure you choose the spot you plant your comfrey wisely. Chances are you will have a very difficult time getting rid of it once it is established!

In its new home around our "Jonafree" apple tree

Comfrey and Poultry: 

- Comfrey makes a wonderful poultry feed. It is very high in both protein and mineral content. Chickens will eat it, but apparently ducks and geese enjoy it even more.

- In addition to allowing his flock access to comfrey during the growing season, Harvey Ussery dries it and adds it to his flock's feed in the winter as a mineral supplement.

Have I sold you on comfrey yet? There's more. 

Medicinal uses for Comfrey: 

-The traditional name for comfrey, "knitbone", is a clue to its use in herbal medicine. Comfrey can be used to help heal cuts, pulled muscles, sprains, and even broken bones! There is a substance inside comfrey called allantoin that speeds up cell regeneration. The allantoin is what makes comfrey such a great plant tonic and it works on people, too.

-Comfrey has been used for centuries, but more recent scientific research has shown that comfrey can cause liver damage when taken internally. You can read more about that controversy here. To be safe, stick to external uses such as poultices or salves. Here's a recipe for a comfrey poultice.


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Now you know why I was so excited that I finally got my hands on some comfrey plants! There's a rumor that I was so excited about my new plants that I sang a song about "Comfrey the Magical Plant" to the tune of "Beans, Beans, the Musicial Fruit", but I can't confirm that.  ;)


References:

1. Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway
2. The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way by Michael Phillips
3. The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers by Harvey Ussery
4. http://www.livestrong.com/article/95655-make-comfrey-salve-poultice/

Putting Up the Last of the Summer's Harvest

We just had our first hard frost of the year. Although we were sad when it happened, we were thankful that it occurred a bit later than is typical for our region. We still had tomatoes, peppers, and other tender summer vegetables flourishing, and it was a blessing that they did not get killed any earlier. When it was clear that the weather was finally going to get cold and stay cold, we made plans for one last picking party and decided what to do with it all.

Hubby Dear picked all the peppers in various stages of ripening. It was easy for me to decide what to do with them; I have well over 4 gallons of peppers in my freezer and zero room left, so dehydration was the only option available.

My pile of peppers

This pile of peppers pretty much filled up my 9 tray Excalibur Dehydrator but when it was dried, it only measured a little over 1quart!

It never fails to surprise me how tiny everything turns when it is dehydrated 

In addition to the bell peppers, we picked another pound of jalapenos (which I'll make into jalapeno jelly) and another 100 cayenne peppers. I plan to turn the cayenne peppers into ground red pepper or red pepper flakes once they all dry.

The tomatoes were a bit trickier. I didn't feel like frying green tomatoes or canning relish, so we decided to try a couple of different methods of ripening them indoors.

Upside down Roma beside chicken moat debris

The first and easiest method simply involved ripping a tomato plant out of the ground and leaving it upside down in our garage. This would not have been a simple task with one of our giant-sized tomato plants, but this Roma plant was modest in size and easily supported by the remesh tomato cage.

The tomatoes should continue to ripen and we can enjoy tomatoes straight off the vine for another few weeks. That's the theory, anyway! We've never had tomatoes survive to this point in the year to try it before.

We used another method on the green tomatoes from our other eight plants.

Hubby Dear giving the tomatoes a dip in bleach water

We mixed a weak bleach solution (1 part bleach to 9 parts water) and briefly dipped each of the green tomatoes in it. We let the tomatoes dry and then packed them in a single layers inside a cardboard box lined with newspaper. We'll check on the boxes frequently and use up any of the tomatoes that are ripe.

Will either of the two tomato ripening methods work? Which will we prefer? I'll keep you posted.

The last bit of garden business we accomplished before the frost was to dig up and bring my rosemary plant indoors for the winter.

My rosemary plant - Cheerio box added for scale! :) 

Rosemary most definitely will NOT overwinter here, so unless I want to buy a new rosemary plant each spring, I have to bring it indoors. Rosemary isn't always a happy camper inside in the winter, but it's worth a shot! My rosemary got very large this year and I took the opportunity to clip it back quite a bit and dry the clippings.

Thyme and rosemary. I prefer to air-dry woody herbs. 

Our garden hasn't been completely put to sleep yet. We still have cauliflower, beets, and other hardy fall vegetables out there. We have a pound of garlic cloves to plant sometime in the next month as well.

Are you still gardening? What's ready to harvest at your house? 

August 2011 in Review and September Preps

I'm a bit late with my monthly summary, but here it is. To cap off a very interesting August, both of our water heaters died last weekend. It took five days for the parts to come in and for the water heaters to get fixed. No hot water when you have four young children home making messes all day in the middle of canning season? Life gets complicated and everything takes about twice as long to get done. It's going to take a few days to unearth my house from under the debris of dirty dishes, kids, and laundry.  I'm hoping September will be a better month.

August Garden:

Here's the bad news: the germination rate hasn't been great for our fall plantings.

Cauliflower hanging in there

We have a few tiny cauliflower and broccoli plants.

The Box of Death

This is the box we have christened "The Box of Death". All the strawberries we planted last spring died and now only one cabbage seedling remains. Lots of seedlings sprouted, but they mysteriously died. What gives?

Brandywine tomato plant gone wild

Our tomatoes are in a holding pattern. The insanely hot weather of July and early August caused the plants to drop flowers rather than produce fruit. Now the weather is better and flowers are setting, but we have to wait until the fruit is produced and ripe.

But there's good news.

The pumpkins are looking great. It won't be long before they're ready to pick. Our cucumbers and cantaloupe are consistently producing, too.

I'm harvesting and drying tons of cayenne peppers.

Green beans in September?

And, miracle of miracles, we have fresh green beans! Lots of them! Hubby Dear picked nearly two pounds just yesterday.

I reported last month that the green beans died, right? Well, in two of the boxes, the green beans bounced back and began producing with the mild weather we've been having.  How strange is that? It's fun to have some garden serendipity instead of garden catastrophe.


August Preps:

• In addition to the odds and ends I picked up at Cabela's, I bought some more items for our long term food storage: local honey, oil, mayonnaise, molasses and evaporated milk. I broke down and shelled out the mega bucks for a case of dry milk. We are getting so close to having a full year's supply of food. Exciting!
• I also added to our three-month supply: dry carrots, dry fruit, cornstarch, granola bars and cereal. My family is a crazy bunch of cold cereal addicts, so we have to build a big stockpile of it. Cereal is getting more and more expensive (like everything else these days) so it's a challenge to find bargains. 
• Speaking of stockpiles, my budding toiletry stockpile was getting out of control. I had been just pitching items in the cabinets in our master bathroom and it was pretty chaotic. To solve this problem, I bought five storage bins and divided the stockpile into five categories: oral care, body wash & soap, skin care, deodorant, and hair care. The bins should hold about a year's supply of these toiletries for my family and items are much easier to find now.  

The beginnings of my hair and skin care stockpile

• I added these two books to my library:  Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition and The Organic Fruit Gardener. 
• I've canned a bit of salsa, spaghetti sauce, pickled peppers, and cucumbers. I have two dynamite recipes to share with you soon. 

What's coming up this September? 

• I'm so excited! Global Sun Oven is lending me a Sun Oven to take for a test drive.  I can't wait to put it through its paces. Will it really work? Is it worth the hype? Is it better for baking cookies than my mini-van? You'll be along every step of the way.
• Of course I'll continue building our food storage. I plan to dehydrate a bunch of herbs and freeze pesto. Apple season is upon us so I'll begin canning applesauce, apple butter, and try my hand at dehydrating apples, as well. 
• The advent of cooler weather reminds me that we need to get a back-up form of heat for our house. We plan to get a wood stove at some point, but for now, a propane heater will have to do. 
•  I'm cutting back a bit on my prepping budget this month to start saving for my chicken coop. Hubby Dear and I are going to begin building the chicken moat this month. Since the two of us are ridiculously un-handy, that should be fun times indeed. Thankfully our marriage is strong enough to survive the trials and tribulations that are sure to unfold. ;) 

What did you do to prep or in the garden during the month of August? What do you have planned for September? 

The Excalibur 9 Tray Dehydrator: A Review in Progress

I'm calling this post a review in progress because I've had my Excalibur dehydrator for a just few days and I've only had a chance to try it out on one type of food. So far, though, I'm pretty happy with my purchase.

Hubby Dear pruned back the oregano in my herb garden this morning and brought in a large pile for me to process.



Mama mia! That's a lot of oregano!



The best time to harvest oregano is right as it goes to flower. We cut it back to about 10" in height, which gives me an ample supply of oregano to dry for use over the next year. Normally, I dry oregano by hanging it up for a couple of weeks in my laundry room.


Yes, my laundry room is the color of Pepto-Bismol. Want to make something of it?


It works well and doesn't use electricity. I just had to try out my new dehydrator, though, so that's what I opted to do this time.

Here's the Excalibur 9 tray dehydrator. It's not a small appliance.

I've owned microwave ovens that were smaller than this.

It's not something I would want to leave out on my counter every day. I'm not sure where I'm going to store it, though, so I'd better work on figuring something out!

The door on the front of the dehydrator comes off, revealing 9 trays that slide in and out.

I started out removing the leaves one by one from the stems and placing them on the tray, but I soon got tired of that. After I finished one tray like that I started loading in entire stems. 

The dehydrator was easy to figure out how to run, even for a technophobe like me.

I plugged it in, turned the dial, and the dehydrator took care of the rest. The instruction manual said herbs should take 2-4 hours at 95 degrees to dry. That may be true for some herbs, but not oregano on the stem! In total, it took 6-8 hours for everything to get completely dry.

I ran my fingers down the stems and was able to easily pull the dried leaves off. I placed the dry oregano in canning jars and vaccuum sealed them with my FoodSaver.

Last year's harvest gave me 1-1/2 pints of dried oregano leaves and I've still got a bit leftover. By the time I'm through with that pile on my table, I'll have more than 2 quarts of it. Anybody need some oregano? ;)

Last year's oregano harvest. Multiply this by 3 for this year.

In the future, I think I'll stick to air-drying with oregano. The Excalibur did a nice job, but it is easier to just hang it up in bundles and let time do the work. I'm curious to see if all the great reviews for the Excalibur are also true when it comes to things like fruit leathers, vegetables, and jerky.

Sounds like a part two for this review is in order!

Have you seen this?

Freeze-dried herbs! I haven't seen any of the food storage companies carrying anything like this, have you?

I've used freeze-dried basil for some time. It's the next best thing to fresh, much closer than traditionally dried basil.

When I was perusing the spice section in our little podunk grocery store, I noticed that they now carry other freeze-dried products: dill, oregano, red onion, chives, parsley, and, most excitingly, cilantro. I know cilantro is one of those things that you either love or you hate, but we adore it. I do grow cilantro in my herb garden, but it tends to bolt and go to seed quickly. Now I can have some shelf-stable cilantro on hand to add to all those black beans I'm storing.

Here's a source for freeze-dried herbs.  They come in a glass bottle and are definitely not vacuum or nitrogen packed, which is less than ideal for long term storage. Still, I think they are definitely a worthwhile addition to our food storage.