What is this plant please?

Hi could anyone help me identify this plant which is growing in my east facing border? Not the best time to ask I realise as it's not in flower but it has small pink and blue flowers which unfurl in the early spring, hairy leaves and both the bees and my chickens love it! It's taking up rather too much space though so tips on getting rid also appreciated.
TIA, Sarah

 

It's probably borage.

Best way to get rid of it would be to dig it all out, the roots probably go down at least a spade's depth, and you might get the odd bit coming back next year, but you should get rid of most of it that way.

Quite difficult to eradicate it by chemical means, treating it with Roundup or a brushwood killer would have some effect, but it would probably take more than one application, and you'd run the risk of damage to any other plants you have nearby.

 

Leaves look like comfrey to me. The description fits too. The mention of pink would sway me more towards comfrey and away from borage too, because borage flowers are to my knowledge always a beautiful vivid blue, in sharp star shape. Comfrey produces blue or pink flowers in a more tubular shape.

If it's borage, simply pulling it out regularly will eventually sort it, as it's annual I believe.

If it's comfrey then I suspect roundup is the way, as it is both perennial and extremely deep rooted.

Borage and comfrey are both closely related, making it a bit tricky to be certain of an id based on leaf alone.

 

Thanks for the replies. Knowing borage and having googled images I now know this is comfrey. I'm not keen on using roundup as we have animals and young children who are often in the garden. I might wait until winter when the garden in less in use. Would digging up as much as I can in the meantime help - and I could then treat the roots and soil more directly rather than spraying leaves? I have other plants surrounding this area including a large choysia and an alchemilla that I wouldn't want to lose.

 

Dig up as much as you can, then wait a few weeks and see if it comes back before deciding on any chemical treatment.

If you only get a few shoots coming back, regular removal by hoeing or pulling them up will probably beat it eventually.

 

As a potential alternative plan, lots of people grow comfrey on purpose, as a nutrient rich green manure crop. It's extremely deep tap root draws up minerals from very deep in the ground where most plants roots simply can't reach. All that said, although the wild one is fine for that purpose, it can become invasive. The one grown as green manure is usually a cultivar called boking 14, which can only be propagated by root cuttings as it is selectively bred to be sterile.

 

00000000000000000000000000001348SazG treat it with Glyphosate which is biodegradable BUT don`t get it on the foliage of any plants you want to keep. Also, once dry, anything treated with Glyphosate is safe to children and animals once dry.

 

Maybe, Maybe not, the jury is out on that one.

 

Europe may ban Glyphosate.....

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/why-europe-may-ban-most-popular-weed-killer-world

UK is concidering doing this as well.

 

The jury in this case being the one asked to look at very skewed data showing that if you repeatedly expose lab mice to high concentrations of it, then some develop cancer.

In the US they routinely spray cereal crops with it in huge quantities. The dying corn, in a last effort to reproduce the grains grow faster and larger. It's a frowned upon practice, and high concentrations of glyphosate have been measured in food. But the yanks eat it routinely. If glyphosate was really harmful I'm sure it would have shown up in the largest natural study of all time, ie what happens when 300 million yanks eat it every day for breakfast.

I'm sure it's not exactly good for anyone. Perhaps it's like having a sneaky cigarette in the garden. If you do it when the kids are in the house, by the time they come out the smoke has blown away. Even if they were stood right next to you they'd come to no harm, but if you stick them in a cage and smoke at them constantly for hours then they're going to get ill. Probably the same deal with glyphosate.

 

And in the UK.

 

I didn't realise that. I thought our stricter food rules forbade such practice.

 

https://www.soilassociation.org/better-food/our-campaigns/not-in-our-bread/

 

That is just propaganda from the soil association.