Comfrey....yes or no?
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ohiofarmgirl
Sipping Bacon Martinis
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wow! thanks for sharing this. i hadnt thought about "companion" planting it... now i have some ideasLesa said:
Henrietta23
Yard Farmer
In the 70s my father stuck a comfrey plant in behind the garden shed and it took over back there. That summer my mother was attacked by our cat. He bit and scratched up her arm really bad. Dad read in MEN or somewhere about making a poultice from the comfrey. So Mom mixed up this nasty slimy green paste and put it on her arm. Her wounds healed very quickly and without scarring. That's my only experience with it, other than it took over back there and was awesomely big!
Dawn419
Almost Self-Reliant
We have ours planted under our fruit trees also for the same reason.Lesa said:
Dawn
You are more right than wrong. Back in the late 1960's The Bocking 14 cultivar was promoted as the greatest thing since sliced white bread for poultry and other livestock feed it is a crossbreed called Russian Comfrey, a cross of Symphytum officinale (common or medicinal Comfrey) and Symphytum asperum (rougth or prickley Comfrey) the Bocking 14 cultivar was sterile it did not produce seeds that were carried by birds and therefore did not tend to spread all over and take over the place. Comfrey is very hard to kill! Bocking 4 did produce seeds but most birds would not touch them. The big draw for feed production was the high Nitrogen (protein) in the plants which could be cut up to 5 times during a season and it would grow back. This also made it good for compost.gettinaclue said:
I don't want to write a book but I managed to get some Bocking 14 cuttings and reproduced it a few times by taking more cuttings. The only problem was that my chickens, ducks and geese would not eat it! My neighbor's goats, sheep and hogs loved it so I would trade it to them for poop for my compost heap. After a cpuple of years of that I started trying to kill it off. I could kill it to ground level only to regrow from the roots. When I left that farm the stuff was still growing strong. BTW I think the herbalists want the Symphytum officinale NOT the Russian Confrey which is a different plant.
lwheelr
Lovin' The Homestead
WZ, part of the reason why Uncle Sam's recommendations always end up being proven false, is due to the food production industry.
They target saturated fats - and they test people on a low saturated fat diet. Naturally, since convenience food is being produced using a lot of saturated fats, and since not much food is being produced in convenience forms with low saturated fats, the people in the study have to go back to more basic slow foods in order to meet the requirements.
The test results show that the people on the study do better than those eating "normal" food. It may in part be the saturated fats (or the TYPE of fats) they have eliminated, but mostly, it is the fact that they had to eat BETTER food during the trials.
Then the food industry gets involved. Foods low in saturated fats become the rage, and every food manufacturer comes out with a food that is "low in saturated fats". But they've put all sorts of other garbage in there, and they've added NEW garbage to make it taste the same as it did before. So all these duped sheeple start eating the new food, which is LESS healthy than the old food, and suddenly the problems get worse.
New study, 10 years later shows the OPPOSITE of the original study - why? Because it isn't the same food that is being tested!
Same with salt - a low salt diet originally meant you had to EAT LESS PROCESSED FOODS. Now, people think it means EAT MORE SALT SUBSTITUTES. Those are not the same thing, and the salt substitutes are actually MORE harmful than salt!
You can track the same thing with the whole low fat thing - fat substitutes came along AFTER the study and they are more harmful - with oat bran - suddenly oat bran was in a bunch of highly processed foods - fiber - instead of increasing good whole grains the food producers just started adding fiber only to the same garbage foods - and with low carb - we now have all sorts of low carb "foods" which have far less actual FOOD in them than the stuff they are replacing.
In every case, the research was flawed because it failed to take into account all factors, and made the wrong recommendation initially, and then because it was commercialized and the result was worse than the original diet.
There is no profit, you see, in recommending that people eat a simpler cleaner diet. There is a great deal of profit in selling "magic" foods, so the trials are always aimed at trying to find a magic bullet food so they can sell that.
The liver damage studies are certainly done with an eye to profit somewhere. Comfrey DOES work as a healing herb, and some pharma company was surely trying to extract the right substance to sell as a magic potion, and instead discovered something that backfired in high concentrations. So they can now use that to vilify the herb, while they continue to try to isolate something useful out of it.
I use comfrey, I just avoid repeated use. It is safe for internal use, or use on open wounds, under the same conditions - just don't use it more than a few times in a single spot, and not too much overall. And avoid herbal lotions meant for daily use, or herbal salves recommended for use on chronic skin disorders, which include comfrey as an ingredient.
Repeated use, or large doses internally, are where you get into trouble.
The issues simply aren't the same for animals, their digestion handles things that ours does not, and their lifespan is shorter, so long term issues never develop.
They target saturated fats - and they test people on a low saturated fat diet. Naturally, since convenience food is being produced using a lot of saturated fats, and since not much food is being produced in convenience forms with low saturated fats, the people in the study have to go back to more basic slow foods in order to meet the requirements.
The test results show that the people on the study do better than those eating "normal" food. It may in part be the saturated fats (or the TYPE of fats) they have eliminated, but mostly, it is the fact that they had to eat BETTER food during the trials.
Then the food industry gets involved. Foods low in saturated fats become the rage, and every food manufacturer comes out with a food that is "low in saturated fats". But they've put all sorts of other garbage in there, and they've added NEW garbage to make it taste the same as it did before. So all these duped sheeple start eating the new food, which is LESS healthy than the old food, and suddenly the problems get worse.
New study, 10 years later shows the OPPOSITE of the original study - why? Because it isn't the same food that is being tested!
Same with salt - a low salt diet originally meant you had to EAT LESS PROCESSED FOODS. Now, people think it means EAT MORE SALT SUBSTITUTES. Those are not the same thing, and the salt substitutes are actually MORE harmful than salt!
You can track the same thing with the whole low fat thing - fat substitutes came along AFTER the study and they are more harmful - with oat bran - suddenly oat bran was in a bunch of highly processed foods - fiber - instead of increasing good whole grains the food producers just started adding fiber only to the same garbage foods - and with low carb - we now have all sorts of low carb "foods" which have far less actual FOOD in them than the stuff they are replacing.
In every case, the research was flawed because it failed to take into account all factors, and made the wrong recommendation initially, and then because it was commercialized and the result was worse than the original diet.
There is no profit, you see, in recommending that people eat a simpler cleaner diet. There is a great deal of profit in selling "magic" foods, so the trials are always aimed at trying to find a magic bullet food so they can sell that.
The liver damage studies are certainly done with an eye to profit somewhere. Comfrey DOES work as a healing herb, and some pharma company was surely trying to extract the right substance to sell as a magic potion, and instead discovered something that backfired in high concentrations. So they can now use that to vilify the herb, while they continue to try to isolate something useful out of it.
I use comfrey, I just avoid repeated use. It is safe for internal use, or use on open wounds, under the same conditions - just don't use it more than a few times in a single spot, and not too much overall. And avoid herbal lotions meant for daily use, or herbal salves recommended for use on chronic skin disorders, which include comfrey as an ingredient.
Repeated use, or large doses internally, are where you get into trouble.
The issues simply aren't the same for animals, their digestion handles things that ours does not, and their lifespan is shorter, so long term issues never develop.
Maggies Pop
Power Conserver
I just made the ointment from this recipe and have already had to use it a few times. Worked great!Dawn419 said:
We use comfrey for liquid fertilizer. The people we just got our goats from said the goats really like it a lot. So we may use it for them too.
