Auxin

Yesterday I ran a 5K in -6° weather with a nice light wind. Today it got up to a toasty 2° when I was playing in the garden. I had to take off my hat. Envy Me

My first impulse was to say war crimes, but I'm not sure war is a proper term when one side has no hope of fighting back in an organized and efficacious manner. Also not terrorism, because terrorism uses psychological pressure as the predominant tool to do the work of bringing down or disrupting a society. So, 'colonial genocide'.

Yeah hostilis, I looked for that SS pic too. Its not just the photo gallery but the .jpg is missing from their directory as well as I direct linked it a few months back. Their photos were probably using too much bandwidth.

I still dont get the aussie hysteria over terrorism. Last time I checked (admittedly, a few years) there had never once been a terrorist attack within australia. This, according to rigorous scientific statistics, literally puts the probability of dieing of terrorism even with: spontaneously vanishing and reappearing in Berlin, machine elves exiting hyperspace and causing mischief in the streets, or being involved in a government verified space alien attack. Even in my country one is more likely to be struck by lightning rather than be killed by terrorism, and pissing off foreigners is one of our national pass-times. Is your government just manipulating peoples irrational fears to control them?

Its a good vegan source of iron, and mine is organic as well. Bring on the anemic vegans! It makes good hair gel, and I grow woad as well. Bring on the punks with blue mohawks! I'm not sure how it works as shaving cream, but if you need your back shaved we could try! ... or perhaps not, actually.

I left most on their own roots too. It took weeks of coddling to do it without killing them but I got them to grow under full summer sun at that size. They should be dormant by now but mealies made me soak them with soapy water a dozen times... the bastards. Amoungst the normal ones are 47 crests, 4 polycephalics that will almost certainly crest, and 2 mad puppers- havent a clue what they'll do.

I can report this, as well, for the LC001 and LC002 bridge & pach crosses. Some look like straight up pach even if they had a bridgesii mother, some look like peruvianus. Seems a common thing to happen when bridgesii and pachanoi hybridize.

It couldnt be sun burn because the seedlings were grown in full sun for months and then moved indoors, wedge grafted, and then they grew 1 to 3 cm of nice green before turning yellow on the new growth, and then the old growth before promptly rotting. Ungrafted siblings are doing fine. It also doesnt look like variegation because, as far as I know, variegation doesnt start at the tip and then move down an established stem before rotting? If they do then I'm glad I have no variegated cacti, lol Perhaps some kind of stress relating to rapid indoor growth on seedlings that had been growing hard under the summer sun? Cactus PTSD. Only happens with plants with a (S X P) parent tho. I did have an orgy cactus (TPC X everyone at the party) rot on a peres but it didnt fit the above pattern. Perhaps I'm just killing off the flimsy limp wristed cacti from that group and it'll be the leathery biker cacti that survive.

I've noticed something odd on the TPM X (S X P) and (S X P) X TPM lines. When a seedling is put on pereskiopsis it will begin growing and then the new growth will turn bright yellow and the whole thing will die. I've never seen that happen with grafts before and it is only happening with these two groups. Not all tho, a few went full course to degraft and are doing fine. Its just odd. Whats the cause of this type of graft fail?

[Link] I like the "I want to eat your spleen" look the kid is giving, and lol @ them for naming that file unhealthydie.jpg Not too surprising that self destructive behavior in the home is correlated with anxiety and mood disorders in the children.

This myth of peyote roots being dangerous and lethal and poised to be the perpetrator of botulism or terrorism or moral corruption in whoever sees them surfaces every year. Something doesnt have to be inherently false to be a myth, a myth is a traditional story promulgated to spread someones belief or agenda. Your more likely to get botulism from green beans, garlic, or chilli peppers but it can occur in nearly anything that was preserved improperly. However, some people who are understandably bothered by unethical harvesting of wild peyote purposefully exaggerate the implications of damaging wild peyote roots in order to get people to stop damaging them. The underlying sentiment is honorable, but their methods are unskillful. If you lie to people to get your way, when they learn you were full of shit they rebel and believe nothing you say. Like the 'educators' who insist marijuana will give boys D cup breasts and will give girls lop sided hairy wookie tits and a beard. When the victim learns the truth they assume everything the educator said about drugs is a lie and they proceed to smoke meth in a mcdonalds bathroom in rebellion. The myth of peyote being a dangerous source of botulism will also fuel legislative efforts to suppress religious and social rights to peyote use because, lets face it, unlike teenagers when a politician hears something damning about drugs they rarely investigate to see if it is false. So yeah, a case of botulism was supposedly linked to peyote use. Hundreds, nay thousands, of cases are linked to green beans and garlic. Should we ban green beans to prevent terrorism? Should the italians have to edit the bible to get religious allowances to use their dangerous garlic and if they share garlic with the french should they be imprisoned for ten years, or twenty? And what about the thais? They just fucking stuff fish in a sealed jar and let it rot for 6 months before eating it, and thats explicitly against their religion. Millions of thais! Thats like a terror network right there man. The moral from any botulism case is simple: Learn to preserve food, any food, properly.

Good work, I grew a pair of the bastard things for 4 years and they never flowered I guess they need the tropics. Some data from the United Nations, of all places: It looks like in interspecific crosses its best to use galapagoense as the male parent.

Experiments done on Hylocereus [Link] found that desiccated pollen freezer stored (-18°C or less) for 9 months was just as viable and vigorous as fresh pollen whereas pollen stored at +4°C degraded in quality. The full text of that paper is accessible for the graphs and table

Wow, I'd seen references in journal abstracts to the fluorenones in Dendrobium gibsonii but I didnt log in to see the structures. That dengibsinin is a sexy one, reminds me of the bioactivated antioxidant flavones and lignans. Selaginpulvilin A looks like a bad girl, must be why vilin is in the name

[Link] Just curious whos in love with themselves

I remember it was substituted at carbon 9 with a carbon chain, I think one with heteroatoms (O or N) on it somewhere, but the bit that connected to carbon 9 was a carbon with carbon(s) attached. It was substituted somewhere other than carbon 9 as well but I cant remember specifics. SciFi nder sounds fun.

I expect the pharmaceutical giants have such a critter. Pop in some structure bit, cross reference to activity or receptor affinity, and the database squirts out a list. I wish things like that would show up on piratebay. If there was just 1 awesome database leaked for every hundred midget pornos....

Yeah, pine needles are far underrated as a planting medium. Old dogma calls them allelopathic but, really, once they are brown that property is gone from the cone bearing evergreens. Other dogma says theyre too acid, which is an overstatement, or that they kill plants by 'stealing' all the nitrogen which might have a grain of truth in the short term in nitrogen needy plants that are not given fertilizer. Pee diluted to 1/10th is a very effective fix for that, even at 1/40th the plant could still get its share. I use evergreen duff as a major component of soil mix and as a soil amendment. For the soil mix I lay it out into a thick flat sheet and water it twice a day for a week before loading into storage bins, that way the stuff is moist and decomposing when I mix up potting soil. I use it successfully in varying ratios with more decomposed stuff and mineral for Trichs, Gymnos, Mamms, chilli peppers, tomatoes, vegetable seedling starts... good stuff. I've seen people successfully use chipped christmas trees as soil amendment in vegetable gardens. But black walnut is typically the bane of gardeners, lol, as the juglone blocks respiration in the roots of many plants.

Anyone with a black walnut tree knows that the juglone in their tissues kills or stunts many plants. Six months ago I ran out of potting soil and still had a stack of bare root trichs. I looked around and saw pine needles with black walnut shells mixed in, so for shits and giggles I mixed in some dirt and planted the cacti in the funk. They all did great, doubled in size just like it was the proper soil mix. Just one experience, so not enough to gamble heavily on, but it at least seems obvious juglone is not horribly lethal to Trichocereus cacti. Just wanted to put that on the record somewhere

Nope, wasnt a ß-carboline, there was definitely a carbon there. Tho, since the substituent connected to that spot can be a nitrogen and do the cancer fighting thing with the nitrogen just 1 space removed from the ß-carboline position I wonder if harmine was tested for the BAX activity. Harmine is known to have an anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic effect on cancer. Its too bad that when they throw the whole library of 300,000 compounds at something we cant see all of the raw data. Positive hits are discounted for reasons that wouldnt bother me, like not being patentable or being hallucinogenic.

And, no, it wasnt gibberellic acid

Clever fucker sits on the cactus when he's not eating the kale.

The smell gets a disproportionate amount of press. Asparagus pee flavor never gets any mention. We should do a double blind study! ...or we could at least eat asparagus on dates and get a bit frisky.

I hadnt heard of pedalium... an aphrodisiac that treats gonorrhea, how efficient, you could use it before the date and after like the cactus thats hair conditioner and birth control. But yeah, theres a ton of non-entheogenic medicines that will grow there. European and chinese pharmacognacy abound with plants that can survive in scotland.

Scutellarias, Desmanthus i&l, Lespedeza bicolor, T. bridgesii if brought indoors for winter dormancy, possibly T. macrogonus outdoors if protected from winter wet, Ipomoeas, Daturas and mandrake if thats your thing, tobacco if thats your thing, Peganum harmala (protect from winter wet?), mugwort for dream pillows. You could try to breed plants that are almost hardy enough to be fully hardy.