Grand Erections - Comfrey Pipe

Sorry if you found this post by the first part of the title in Google, but it's about gardening porn.

The comfrey is growing at an alarming rate and now I have onions in the ground that will need feeding, and the grass cuttings are starting to flow from all directions for composting, I really needed to erect the comfrey pipe. You may recall that in true Blue Peter fashion I made the end cap, bottle holder and weight last month.

So with my daughter working nights and being around this morning to keep an eye on the wife, I nipped into the allotment at about 7:15 this morning and used the auger to drill a hole next to the walking onion bed and positioned the 75mmx75mm fence post. 

Next I screwed the two side cheeks of the milk bottle holder and then the top plate with the slot for the silicon nozzle and end cap. I used two small steel angles to fix the side cheeks to the scaffolding board of the raised bed to offer a little more lateral restraint against wind, as this one is free standing and not fixed to the wall like my comfrey pipe on my Mill Green Allotment.

Two pipe fixings were screwed to the post, the cap tapped into place on the pipe and then the pipe offered up to the brackets and they were locked in place. 

All that remained was to cut up two square flower buckets of comfrey and fill the pipe to a level where the weight was visible but the bottom still supported by the pipe. A milk bottle was offered up so the nozzle was inside the milk bottle and a half brick slid under the bottle to keep it in place. 

A small amount of water was poured in the top of the pipe, and allowed to drip into the milk bottle, this was then poured over the walking onions, waste not want not. So now I have damp comfrey in full sunlight with a 2 litre bottle of sand under the influence of gravity compressing the comfrey. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the weight starts to disappear into the top of the pipe and the black gold starts dripping into the milk bottle.

Photo of the two comfrey beds at the back of the allotment today

The same comfrey beds on the 26th March 2017  

Next job is to get the spare dustbin water butt over from my other plot so that I can have comfrey on draft.