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gtarman

What are your thoughts on BAPing?

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So I might have not spelled it correctly...but that stuff that I think is called BAP that I remember people posting about a while back - the chemical you apply to the areoles of a cactus to induce insane amounts of pupping.

I don't really have any cacti to try it on these days (apartment living, no garden :(), but I guess I'm just curious. What are the pros and possible cons of using it? Say you get your hands on a really cool/unique cactus (like some delicious and rare fruiting cereus or something) and you want to propagate as much of it as you can as quickly as you can to give as gifts or trades or something...do you think that doing the whole columnar-log-on-it's-side/pup-factory setup and then BAPing the shit out of every other areole would give you better results and more cactus?

I've heard some folks say in the past I think that they reckon they prefer to let them grow naturally and that they might do better that way...does that mean BAP produces unhealthy or unsustainable growth? What are people's experience/thoughts?

I've always been fascinated about the substance since seeing all those cool photos way back, but never got around to asking about it.

Edited by gtarman
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personal, hands on experience makes the best teacher

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I'm extremely interested in this also, if someone could elaborate as to were to get this BAP stuff i would greatly appreciate it. I have a few bridgesii's about 3foot that i have been hoping will start pupping soon but are just continuing to grow upwards.

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Benzyl amino-purine, i used / well tested it on my important cacti, lol on my trichs it seemed to stall their growth regardless of whetherb it was sprayed over the plant or localised treatment, they would just stop growing and i had no pups thrown on those plants for two years, but, on my lophs it caused extremely rapid pupping in fact pups were forming on emerging pups, and that scared me a little cause i didn't think the plant could sustain such rapid growth. It did tho and propagationof lophs was - well i felt a bit like dr. Frankenstein, lol.

On a side not i am pretty sure the farms here spray bap on foliage, it speeds up branching and i guess fruiting by proxy, One week you see tomato seedling being planted, in 3-4 weeks picked, that maybe an exageration, but its so dam quick, lol.i have found chem containers which say there is bap in the cocktail inside, but not purely bap. Makes me wonder what we are actually eating, and my biggest concern would be, it's a hormone is it safe for consumption??

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personal, hands on experience makes the best teacher

I know...I know :rolleyes::P

But yeah the reason I ask here instead is because I'm curious about other peoples' experience, and what is has taught them. As that old Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck used to say "...a wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

Actually I'm probably the biggest proponent of (sucker for?) making your own mistakes. But in this instance it really is just down to logisitics - I'm curious, and living in an apartment with anti-garden flatmates means I won't have the opportunity to experiment with this anytime in the near future. So I'd just like to hear what others have to say for now.

Also, off-topic but I've been meaning to ask you for a while...how did that flowering TBM of yours work out from a little way back? Did it set seed? And were the seeds viable?

And in_spirit - this is the kind of thing I'm interested in hearing about. Some people seem to have very different experiences with it. But I definitely remember seeing pics of it used on trichos that went nuts and pupped like there was no tomorrow.

Edited by gtarman

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Was the flowering tbm photoshopped? Or legit? My experience with bap, got a batch off someone, scratched it into areoles, which in turn turned black, and never pupped.. got a new batch and am yet to try it but i will some time soon and post results

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Yeah gt,

Yeah there may well be people that have had success on trich's but in my search,which was limited to 'SAB' and 'thenook', peoplehad si ilar results. I think and i amgoing back some years, lol... Flower at thenook, had some great results,not sure about the trichs but from memory, he had similar issue. It was all new to me then but his post at thenook was my inspiration, and flower was the personwho i got the BAP from. It does do miraculous things, but any trich i tried it on simply stalled, buti didn't keep notes, i know i tried it on eileen thos and she was held in a timelock 2+ years, lol..

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Here we go, just looking at the first page reminded me ( via photo, lol) tbm's really had good success but too much and they also stalled. In my experience Eileen only got the aerioles and she still stalled, so back then it was experimental, maybe thenook guys figured out some ideals ppm to mix it to???

http://www.thenook.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=58223&hl=bap&page=1

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I did a 3 hour Bap session about 8 weeks ago...spring..inside...Bapped everything in sight lol.....

I read you should see results after 6 weeks...but nothing back then...bearing in mind it was an early spring Bap...

Now (8 w.) a couple of pups are emerging on some cereus logs...and a trich look alike, I didn't Bap many of the trichs cause the big 1's are all San p & they are naturally prolific puppers...most of my trich x's are still small......but a blue cereus that's grown about 100m top in 4 weeks hasn't pupped...nor have many other rarities....so did they pup due to Bap or did they pup cause they were planing on pupping?....I don't know?

Apartments got plenty of room for columnar cacti ...poor excuse...as for cereus xmas presents...maybe for xmas 2017...if you start now...& you'd need to to do at least 2 genetic strains for fruit.........

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my experience has shown bap fucks with a plant too much for anyone to seriously considering using it to force pup growth.

if you want an actively growing trich to pup, realistically you have 2 choices: let it continue to grow and when it decides its big enuf, it will pup on its own, or if you want to take matters into your own hands, whack off the growing tip. now it has to pup, and it will do so, again on its own terms as to time & how many.

how many actively growing meristems can a trich have? is each growing at the same rate? or one faster than the others? do the slower growing meristems eventually stall? if you whack the top off & 3 new pups appear, will all three grow as fast as the single original?

somehow, i miraculously obtained a thumb sized non rooted variegated tbm cutting. it was 4 cm long & 2 cm wide, and no roots. so first i rooted it, maybe took 4-6 months. it wasnt going to get any bigger than it already was. since it had no actively growing meristem

once it rooted, i decided to bap an aerole. shortly thereafter (shortly being defined as 3-6 months), a new variegated pup appeared. it grew until it too terminated, as all tbm pups eventually do.

over the course of several years, more pups appeared, but keep in mind at no time were there more than one actively growing meristems.....as the plant matured (added biomass & photosynthesizing surface area), eventually it could support more than one actively growing meristems, on various 'branchs'. i purposely chose to remove pups that were too green to suit my tastes, but that action would slow down the overall growth because variegation makes a poor photosynthesizer....which actively growing plants require....

so then one day i decided to bap several aeroles to see what would happen. a total freak appeared on one, & the other did nothing. the freak grew like mad, then it too pupped, producing more freaks. a salient point to remember though, successive freak pups never achieved full maturity size before pupping themselves. the bap carryover was forcing them to pup (give birth to children before they had matured enough to do so on their own), which is certainly not healthy genetics. think about that for awhile, in your quest for pups

my experiences with bap leads me to the conclusion that forcing a plant any living entity with man made chemicals to do something faster or quicker than it would normally do on its own cannot be a good thing

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Slightly off topic, but in my experience I have found that a couple of strong doses of miracle grow a few weeks apart will encourage trichocereus to pup more than usual

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Im not a huge fan. The pups that it creates often dont grow very fast (or at all).

Its never a great thing to have 7 pups coming off the one spot!

However it can be a bit of fun, so give it a go. Just not on your favorites!

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