Comfrey, amongst its many hardinesses and tolerances, doesn’t seem to be too phased by an occasional frost hit. Some of its early leaves may be blasted, but so long as the root is OK, it will come back. Believe me: this is a very tough, tenacious plant! I’d guess that so long as you have a piece of root in the ground with a green growing tip at its top, you can just leave it lightly covered with nurse mulch, to protect from hard frost, and let it take care of itself. It will start growing as soon as things are minimally warm enough. People’s chief issue with comfrey is how to get rid of it when they don’t want it…..

I have put charcoal in my humanure bucket during the Winter, because I tend to empty my woodash/charcoal from my stove straight into the bucket. It’s all going to the same place in the end: the composting bin, and then into the soil. But for smell control and fly discouragement sawdust or fairly dry soil seem best. Do remember though that one way or another you will need to keep almost all liquid out of the manure bucket, otherwise it will overwhelm the semi-dry processes which keep everything sweet, and the smell then gets bad. I don’t know about the different processes in detail, but I know that rule of thumb from experience. I have three containers in my john: the sit-on bucket, with comfortable seat, a gallon can to take the separate fluid stream, and a bucket, with scoop, full of soil/sawdust/woodash/char (varying mixes). Fortunately, my parner and I have this semi-detached arrangement: I live on my boats, she has her house — with orthodox flushing john — seven miles away. I’ve never had to make arrangements for resident females. The only thing I know that’s a foolproof separator in that case is the set-up at Cae Mabon, as described in the earlier post above.

Hitler has been a Handy Halfbrick ever since the real horror of WWII receded into pop pabulum history.

it also compares her (again) to a man, thus reinforcing the gender kapu slur… I wonder why a leftyboy web site would not hit closer to the mark and compare her to Maggie Thatcher, who also ran on an “iron lady” neolib/authoritarian strategy…

Thanks for the details — it sounds like we are a couple of years behind you in experimenting with specifics of locale, climate, and soil. I forgot to mention that we have also used the cardboard sheet mulching technique. And your comments on ph make sense to me — if we are building raised beds then we needn’t worry so much about original soil composition.

Could I also ask you & others what season is good to plant comfrey? Where we are, you sometimes have to do things in February that others do in April. Our official average last frost date is April 8, but many years we don’t get any frost after February. So, basically, can comfrey be planted when it is already pretty warm?

We are just now trying the potatoes-in-a-barrel technique, but your method sounds more natural. The liquid feeding method is what we call around here “compost tea” (uses a burlap sack full of compost suspended in water). In that regard, I also recently read somewhere of a Japanese method that I would like to try — it has you planting your beds around a large central compost pile. Instead of watering your plants directly, you put all the water into the compost pile and it then leaks out and feeds the surrounding plants

“Enemy women” concepts don’t have much to do with this Presidential campaign. There’s nobody doiny any “enemy woman” rhetoric in the context of the current Presidential campaign , so raising _that_ is more like the defeniveness on this thread.

Huh?

When news commentators say “I can see Hillary’s adams apple,” what is that? And the fact is, when Bill Clinton was race-baiting, he was called everything from pragmatic to racist, but not monster (unnatural).

It’s “defensiveness” to bring forward the issue of “enemy women”? Have you read anything written above?

I haven’t actually done any soil testing on the base clay soil here, only on the upper six inches of the fill in my raised beds (ph was just nicely on the cusp, according to the colour of my litmus paper test strips). I assume that any clay two feet below will have less effect on the plants than the contents of the tyre-stack beds, and will in any case be altered by the trickle-down from the specially-concocted soil inside them.

I remembered after posting the previous items that I have indeed put some coarse stuff into the base of the tyre-stacks, straight onto the underlying turf of the ground here. I also had a special ‘three-year bin’ that I added at one end of the row of compost bins that we have at Cae Mabon, into which went all the woody plants, thin twiggy branches trimmed from the many trees there, and any rotting logs that we well along in the process and already soft. This is a useful resource, it seems to me, and shouldn’t be neglected, but will take longer to finish than the other bins, with their softer green waste.

What I did when filling my beds here was to lay coarse stuff from the local woods nearby into the bottoms. This included a good deal of thin-ish dead wood, which just happened to be gathered up along with the broadleaf forest-floor litter that was one of the main components. Plenty of coarse, dry woody plants in the ‘wild meadow’ mulch scythings also went into the lower layers. Also, I forgot to include in the list the cardboard. I have a local source, a neighbour’s farm-shop, where they have a big flow of wasted cardboard boxes, which I get free for the carrying. A good deal of this was crumpled up or torn roughly, then thrown into the bottom of the beds when filling was just starting. So I suppose you could say that they have their slow-release-plus-drainage layer next to the clay.

This year, following the experience of a poster to one of the gardening websites, a man in — I seem to remember — Kentucky or somewhere nearby, I used sheet mulch made from flattened out cardboard boxes, straight onto the turf. No digging! Wonderful. Then I barrowed in more of that peaty-seeming duff from under the Cypressus trees, and made mounds straight on top of the cardboard, and planted a seed potato in each mound. Just a bit of mouse attack so far, but fifty-two plants already growing strongly.

My US instructor, follow Ruth Stout’s ideas, has done several seasons this way, and as the plants emerge and start to reach up, he piles hay-type mulches around each one, to suppress competition, and to give the tuber branches a clean, lightly moist medium in which to grow. As the plant pushes up higher through its collar of mulch, he adds more layers. The result is like one of those potatoes in a barrel methods, using a compost fill: Several storeys, so to speak, of tuber branches, with lots of potatoes at each level, and all beautifully clean and unscabby, because they’ve grown exclusively within this bed of hay/straw/herbs, gently rotting down into soil food over the season. But I also plan to do some liquid feeding of my sturdy-looking youngsters with comfrey/nettle tea. Just setting up the tub now: feed in cut comfrey and nettles at the top. Add cold water. Leave to stew, Tap out the brown super-liquid at the bottom and water on. But be careful. Experiment with diluting it, to make it go further and to soften its potent clout a little. Ace stuff. Plants love it.

Another technique that enriches soil and sequesters carbon and that we are trying is something described in different permaculture texts as “hugel kultur” (”hill growing” I guess in German) — you basically would skip the burning and just bury brush and timber as the basis of your raised beds and then let it rot underground over many years, which would provide both a sponge for moisture regulation and a slow release of carbon and organic nutrients into the soil. It would be a lot longer process than putting charcoal into the soil, because more time would be required to break the material down, but it wouldn’t raise ph (might even eventually lower it).

I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this as compared to the biochar method you describe.