This post originally had a different title.

In the interest of full disclosure which is our informal policy here, after I actually made the fertilizer, I had to add the NOT.

It all began well.

I cut a lot of comfrey and packed it into a five-gallon bucket.

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I left it, covered in plastic, for several weeks under the carport.

It stewed in its own juices, so to speak, until it broke down into a foul-smelling, soupy mass.

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As disgusting as that sounds, things up to this point were going as prescribed. It is supposed to break down and it is expected to smell bad.

Today, however, I decided to strain out the solids and collect the liquid so I could use it as fertilizer.

I gloved up carefully because I didn’t want to get the stinky, brown comfrey all over my dainty hands.  Then I put a strainer over a beat up old enamel pot and poured in the comfrey.

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After draining politely for a few seconds the comfrey became impatient to be released from its bucket and charged out of the pot with a sploosh and a splash and soaked my (only partially waterproof) gloves.

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It wasn’t pleasant but I could deal.  Most of the comfrey stayed in the strainer.  It wasn’t straining fast enough for me, though, so I cast my eye around until it landed on my 6-pound chopping maul. Nice and heavy, I thought. I retrieved it and used it to mash the comfrey lump and make the juices drain more quickly.  It sort of worked, but I grew weary of mashing that thing around. It does literally weigh six pounds.

So I smushed it into the comfrey lump and left it in there, deciding that it would help press the juice out like a weight on a cheese mold and walked away to do something else. Seconds later a crash let me know sticking a heavy axe into the top of a lump of mush in a lightweight enamel pot was not sustainable from a physics point of view.  All my valuable comfrey juice was spilling out over the driveway. The lump was lying on the ground, tossed from the strainer.

Getting over my glove thing, I threw them off and set my bare hands to scooping up the comfrey liquid from the asphalt.  Yes, I would smell for days, but I wasn’t going to let weeks worth of comfrey distillate go to waste.  I scooped and scraped and got *most* of the comfrey back into the enamel pot and put the comfrey lump back into the strainer.  I smushed it some more with my hands now that I had a new, closer relationship with the mush anyway.

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It was then I noticed the hole in the enamel pot spewing a steady stream of brown gold back onto the driveway.

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I tilted the pot up so the hole was above the liquid line and scooped again.  I know you are waiting for me to have tipped the thing over again, but I managed to keep it upright this time.  I strained it (only spilling a medium amount in the process) and measured 40 oz. finished product.

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I’ll post again about the uses and the whys and hows of using comfrey fertilizer. Right now I think I just need to lie down for a while.

This stuff better be good.