When the living ain't easy, and nothing com-frey...

Photo via growsonyou.com

I have a terrible garden confession to make.

Many an otherwise viable root crown, tuber, or seed has gone dry, dead or rotten because I didn't get it in the ground in time.  Two years ago, a bag of asparagus crowns got misplaced and forgotten till they were crispy.  Last year, a bag of jerusalem artichokes got put off until they turned to moldy mush.  Some otherwise lovely fruit bushes have been slowly neglected to death while waiting to find a spot in the ground.  It's a not-infrequent problem.  My garden aspirations consistently surpass my available time and opportunity.

But after I goofed up and hurriedly planted a bunch of jerusalem artichokes (the second bunch after I destroyed the first) in the middle of the damn yard earlier this year, Leah gently suggested that I review the decision making process that determines where vigorously spreading large perennials might go when I do manage to find the time to plant them.  Valid point, I said.

Thus, it was with such considerations in mind that I jumped out of my car tonight upon my arrival home, desperately trying to squeeze enough workable daylight out of the evening to get some of my freshly arrived 'Bocking 14' Comfrey root cuttings in the ground.  I wasn't going to let them spoil!

My "better judgement sense" was already tingling... while almost supernaturally beneficial/useful, comfrey propagates easily from root cuttings and is almost impossible to kill/eradicate once it establishes without the use of extreme measures or nasty chemicals.  Each plant can also grow to several feet across and can be quite tall.  I needed to plant it carefully.

I ended up installing half of my supply of root crowns in two different locations: first in a generally weedy corner along the backside of two of my outbuildings (near the loosely encouraged Stinging Nettle plot), and secondly just outside the edge of the back lawn in a low moist area of low scrub below our Black Hawthorn tree.

Both locations feature at least half-day sunlight and soil that tends to remain generally moist, and are far enough out of the way that the plants can grow and spread without displacing anything important or causing an eyesore.  It actually kind of felt like I was hiding them.

As comfrey makes an excellent companion plant for a lot of edibles, we will no doubt end up planting it in other places in the future.  But for now I merely aim to establish a "mother patch", from which I can pull and distribute viable crowns and root cuttings as needed.

Now I just have to figure out where I'll be putting the second half of the order... with ten more to plant, I know there's still time to make a terrible mistake.