Getting Comfy with Comfrey | Harvesting and Uses with Yarrow Willard| Harmonic Arts

Are you ready to get comfy with comfrey? My name is Yara Willard and today I would like to share with you an amazing plant. The comfrey plant. As you can see here we're in a patch of comfrey and it's about harvest time. We want to get these just before they go to flower. Now right here we're almost at that place. Now this is a powerful plant and anyone who's into permaculture will tell you that this is one of their favourite ally plants. But also it's been used for thousands of years, at least hundreds of years we know, as a medicinal plant. And it wasn't until 2001 when it got outlawed as having a high amount of paralyzing alkaloids and being potentially toxic to the liver that it became a taboo plant. So we'll get into that further as we go along. But first I want to share with you to make sure you have the right plant. We're looking actually at comfrey. Now as I said, getting cozy with comfrey. Well, hmmm, comfrey. This is a cozy plant. It's a little prickly, a little hairy. Kind of like 5 o'clock shadow but it's got these tiny little hairs along it. And that's one way we can tell it's the right plant. As well as it's got this big strong midrib and in the summer it'll grow up these beautiful purple bellflowers. Now that's an easy way to tell. The ants colonize this as well as the bees love this plant. Open up these midribs and see how juicy this plant is. Now it breaks apart also really quite easily with stringy stem pieces like this. Now this plant has been used for a lot of different things. In fact, another name for it is bone knit because it's been used to help knit together broken bones. It's what's called a cell proliferant. So there's a high amount of allitoin in this which is a herbal nerdy chemical word for something that brings together better cellular proliferation and doubles the speed at which cells grow. So we can use this on all kinds of wounds, damage, broken bones. People have used it internally and externally in the past but now we've got to be a little bit, as herbalists, we've got to be safe and not tell you to use it internally. One of the reasons that it actually became a problematic plant is that it's really high in protein. Before we had hemp protein and sprouted brown rose protein and we had cow back then but, you know, this was a vegetarian alternative. And people were consuming high volumes of this plant because it has so much in it that that was starting to cause some of the problems. That there was actually major liver damage issues to people consuming big volumes of it. Now, animals have eaten it in the past. People have been using it. So before you go further, make sure you check out on the internet and find out for yourself where the cautions and precautions with this plant are. But what I'm about to tell you again is going to be on that taboo side. So take it with a grain of dulse as we say in herbal medicine. Bone knit, right? This plant, what we're going to use it for mostly in our herbal dispensary is as an oil because we can definitely use this externally on the body safely. So we're going to dry it out or wilt it out and turn it into an oil to be used that way. And we'll make it macerated in olive oil, turn that into a salve, add that to a rescue healing salve, use that in a few different formats. And that can be used for, as I said, a cell proliferant. So if I've got a big scrape or a cut along here, I can put this on and it's going to heal it quite a bit faster. Now I've done that a few times with my hands and I've definitely seen with sprained ankles or a rolled ankle, this can be amazing. One of the easy ways to work with this is to make what's called a poultice. And that is where we take it and we mash it all up into small little pieces and we put it on to our wound. Now you can do that as a spit poultice where you chew it up or you just mash it up like this. Because it's so juicy, it'll hold on like that. You can take bigger, longer leaves and wrap them around and make a band-aid. Like so. Boom. Or, because a little bit of hot water helps extract this better, we'll make a really strong tea or just dip these leaves in hot water and then we'll put that on to the wound. Or a cloth over it, that on. If it's nice and warm, take a nice towel over top of the whole thing and just hold it on as a compress. That'll hold it on like this so we can heal those broken bones, those scrapes, those scabs, those sores, those inflamed and sprained tissues. A lot of different ways this plant can be used. In the past, if you read anything from 1980s or earlier, you'll find out that this was used for all kinds of internal hemorrhaging as well to stop bleeding. Whether that was after birth or menstrual cramping or uterine tonic for women or to stop stomach ulcers or any kind of internal hemorrhaging in the body. Now we can't recommend that anymore, but know that that's how it has been used, as well as broken bones and major swelling. So if we've got somebody who's had a major damage where they've broken themselves, in the past, people would recommend that they use, say they broke their leg, boom, big femur, we would strap comfrey all around us and drink copious amounts of comfrey tea to help heal that. So if you're concerned about the paralyzing alkaloids, know that the roots have about 10 times more of them than the leaves. And it's best to start with the leaf as your medicine. But the root is that much more potent in the allantoin and other chemistry that helps this plant work and do its optimal job. Why do permaculturists love this plant so much? This happens to be one of the best plants for creating nutrients for our compost and creating nutrient-rich soils. It helps rake up the soil and bring up all kinds of nutrients with it as it comes. To bring that and aerate the soil and bring up all the good stuff so other plants can grow. Now the other thing we can do is we can cut some of these right like this and we take them and we can just lay them out. Say we have a garden, we can just lay them out on the soil here. They'll produce a lot of nutrients that will give the year's worth of compost and fertilizer to help bring up more stuff for the plant so they can grow better. Another way to use these leaves as fertilizer is to mix them in with like horsetail and nettles and let them ferment in a big jug full of water. Create like what we call a farm tea or a compost tea. We let that ferment and grow and all the nutrients and minerals out of this pull into that tea and then we water our plants with that. One of the other things that's crazy about this plant is if you rototill it and break it into a thousand little leaves, you've all of a sudden created a thousand little babies and this plant grows up and flourishes. It loves that. It says please, please rototill me, make me a million and I will come forth. And that's how it works. It's like that proliferant, right? We've got that broken bone and we want to make more cells proliferate and grow faster. Well the same thing happens with the roots of this plant. It's what we call a doctrine of signature. Many plants work like this. Now, being the smart herbalist that I am, I know that if I pick this plant right before it goes to flower, I can come back in a few weeks and pick it again. And I can come back a few weeks later than that and pick it again. I can do that all season long because it's got such chi in those roots, such strong energy that I can come back and re-pick this. Now, as you can see, I've got a scythe here. This is one of my favorite tools for this because it hooks right around the plants and I pull them in. This makes it a lot more efficient. We get this, got a nice big badge here, and pull it in, come around, and I just pop. There's my comfrey leaf. And I can pick a lot real fast. Now as you can see, I've already packed my bag on one pull with my scythe. So I better get some more bags. Good thing I have my handy Harmonic Arts and recycled paper bag collection. Now paper bags are a great way to store this because it has a really tough midrib. If we're going to dry this plant out, we want to make sure that we have got that whole midrib dry. And once it's dry, we can test that out by cracking it. If it's still got any moisture in there, it's going to go moldy. This plant molds real easy. Now as you can see, we have a pretty good amount of comfrey. We're going to wilt this all down and we're going to make oil with it. Yes, good old oil. We might even make a little bit of tincture. Shh, don't tell. So I just really want to show you the root of this plant too because it is the root that's the most potent and that's one of the things that we often use in our medicine is the root. So here we go, we've got a nice little plant here. I'm going to dig one up. This is hard work. There we go. That's a big comfrey root. If you break off a piece like that, this root is going to regenerate and turn into a whole new comfrey plant. It's got a white inside and I'm just going to snap off another piece. That's the most potent part. Remember to use the whole herb and nothing but the herb to help your herbalist. We'll see you soon friend.