Comfrey. Comfrey? Three years in, planted and propagated and potted and now fully dibbed-up thanks to www.works-in-wood.co.uk (cute baby dibbers, have a look), and I go on my first course: “Growing to Eat Organically”.

And I am told it is all about comfrey. Not manure, or soil, or the seeds, or the tender loving way I hoick the seedlings in and out, and in and out of that damn greenhouse to windowsill to kitchen table and back again as the seasons blow through winter to spring and summer and back in a week. (Text message arrives right on cue from daughter’s irritated nanny: “Can I move the plants into the greenhouse, please?”)

No, not that, and not the pricking and the dibbing and the picking. Not the worrying and the fussing and the gentle fluffing up of that last little bit of compost on top of the seed (yes, I do). Not even the watering! No, no, none of that. Comfrey.

I wouldn’t mind if I had at least heard of it before. Comfrey, it seems, is one of those weeds I’ve probably been pulling up for years. And according to our course tutor, Susan Maguire of West Dean Gardens, it is the magic key. We walked around Susan’s own garden – a dustbinful of comfrey water here (smelly); a comfrey tube, squeezing pure comfrey juice out of a soil pipe, there; a patch of comfrey being cultivated there. You throw it on, you dilute and pour it on, you spray it on – it’s a sort of one-plant miracle worker.

But perhaps you knew all that. I didn’t. Susan is a biodynamic gardener, which takes organic horticulture into realms I am not sure I want to follow. Her own vegetable patch, magnificent as it is, could almost have been designed to make the likes of you and me feel downright guilty. You mean you don’t sieve your own leaf mould?

As she spoke persuasively of homeopathic manure and shredding and copper tools (they help repel slugs; also, I noted, look pretty), I found my mind wandering through a biodynamic leaflet in front of me: “The stirring of the preparations… The purpose of stirring is to create a vortex. Through the vortex the maximum amount of water will be exposed to air and oxygen and, through this, to the forces of the cosmos.”

I reckon I’m as ethical as the next gardener but I definitely have a long, long way to go before I meet you all around the lunar cycle.

Explore Gardens

• Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

• Chelsea Flower Show

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers