Auxin

Its a shame when little villages or monasteries who really have their shit together get talked about in the developed regions. The places are invariably destroyed. All places that got published as being hotspots of longevity in the andes now have tourism and roads, coca-cola and cheeseburgers. Same in asia. Remote thai temples with advanced meditation masters got a paved road.. followed by so many visitors and tourists that all the meditation masters left. Little stone age bands of naked people living happily in the jungle get missionaries, herpes, TB, and a pathological desire to be american. Places where people are healthy and happy should be protected, their location being secret like is done with new endangered cactus species. If you ever find a village where everyone is happy, when you get home tell folks those people were rude and gave you a nasty case of diarrhea. Gonorrhea is always good, too.

That, and putting a root rot prone cactus on to a rot resistant stock. As long as both are cacti, a graft is most likely possible. Some graft unions are shorter lived than others. Pereskiopsis grafting stock, for instance, is usually removed after a year since the unions eventually fail. Grafting cacti to non-cactus succulents is said to not work, tho I know few who have tried very hard. In short, an alkaloid bearing scion will have less of the alkaloid due to its rapid growth and in the very few tests ever conducted it appeared that alkaloids from the stock do not translocate into the scion. ie. a Gymnocalycium grafted to a peruvianus wont have the peruvianus alks (well, no more than the trivial traces already in Gymnos). The main grafting types to research include the normal stem grafts, like a gymno button on a peruvianus, pereskiopsis grafting which gives extreme growth for a year, areole grafts which get a plant out of each cluster of cactus spines, and hypocotyl grafts- microsurgery grafting the taproot of one seedling onto the top of another seedling (its the rarest of the four). Welcome aboard

Plant roots actively transport large molecules. B12 is a great example, only a protein scientist would call that small and plants intentionally absorb it via their roots and transport it to specific parts of the plant. A few drugs may produce metabolites harmful enough to not want them in your families food, others may be hormonally active in plants as well. I've wondered about the widespread new fad of using naproxen as a pain killer and its effects on other life (its a lipoxygenase inhibitor that, in plants, breaks the abscisic acid biosynthetic pathway)

Good ferts when diluted. I collect mine in a 4 liter iced tea jug Mixes well with liquid from fermenting weeds and veggie scraps in water. One thing I've found useful is to cut the top off a gallon milk jug and drill a 1/16" hole on a corner nearly on the bottom. Pour the ferts in there and it slowly pisses it out, allowing it to soak in deeper feeding just one or a couple plants. And it supplies a added reason to go easy on the dietary salt.

Yeah, cars kill, and sedentary lifestyle kills. So why the hell not try to reduce the number of cars!? People dont have to return to caves to start riding a bike and quit buying absurdly overpriced faulty plastic cars from neon abominations of car lots and surrounding them by 400 watt lights to reduce chances someone will bust the window with a rock to steal their iphone. I live in a city of 300,000 people and I routinely go on 10 mile hikes through the city, not to mention frequent 3-4 mile dog walks and its rare that I will actually pass by another person who is not in a car. Some times weeks pass without it happening. Thats just not right man.

That wont help. Relative to the quantities of waste being produced, chernobyl was a miniscule release into the environment that spread broadly across the globe and is established as causing birth defects in far off places like sweden. And, really, nuclear waste is being sprayed broadly across the planet already. Its called depleted uranium munitions and it causes birth defects and cancer by contamination of water supplies and air. Thing is we're exploiting technology to make the existing immobile radioactive materials (uranium ore) into vastly more dangerous materials. Not just through concentration but by changing them subatomically in a modern sort of alchemy. And no one wants to change them back. It takes manipulation of the books that would make enron envious to even pose nuclear power as cheaper than other power sources, actual neutralization of the waste would increase the costs radically.

So I've been getting increasingly disenchanted with modern industrial western foodways. Our deviation from live and natural food is not for our benefit, its to fulfill and perpetuate someone elses greed to our own medical and cultural detriment. 'Foodways' is a significant component of any culture and too many cultures are loosing a rich tradition in exchange for wonderbread and mcdonalds. My own family lost all of our fermenting wisdom and culture with my great grandmothers, not even a recipe card is left. For years I've intended to 'eventually' learn enough food fermentation skill to at least make kimchi without routine failure and this year I'm expecting an avalanche of vegetables from may through october and I have to preserve them somehow so in come the microbes. I began by reading 'Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods', a rather interesting (and colorful) book. In it the author claims that in his many years of fermenting and arguably 'rotting' food for his and his communities consumption he never got food poisoning. For reasons probably related to cultural bias that surprised me somewhat. Has anyone here had contrary or supporting experiences? He also talks about scraping mold off liquid surfaces and not worrying about it, which somewhat unsettles me I've now moved on to reading anthropological papers and books on indigenous foodways around the world and it amazed me how easy some fermentative processes are. It strikes me as odd that food fermentation is either not done or not talked about even in places like this, vegetarian forums, the nook, etc. So anyone got stuff bubbling in their kitchen? Any notes on good discoveries or disasters? At the moment I have a successful kimchi (w00t) and got a wild sourdough starter begun, next is more kimchi (stuffs expensive here!) but as the season gets going I'mma try gundruk (like salt free and dried mustard leaf sauerkraut), sugar peas, zucchini, okra, radicchio kimchi, and greens from beans, peas, cowpeas, rutabaga, anything without a face really One goal is to develop fermented sauces without cultured asian molds. I'll wait to see how many failures I have before deciding on buying a Aspergillus oryzae starter. I'll post some results here from my kitchen throughout the year Thoughts?

Right on, madhouse. I bet your gonna enjoy it. Whey. IMO some people go WAY overboard with whey. A (mismatched) starter like whey or sauerkraut juice can be worthwhile for things lacking much of a lacto-bacterial compliment. But, instead, using a pro-starter seems to me to make more sense, even if it changes the end product. Like I just got a liter and a half of grated and slivered watermelon rind fermenting. I peeled off the waxy cuticle so I was just using the light green to white stuff and I added some unpeeled grated carrot to get it inoculated. Worked fine. Sure it distinctly changed the product but so would have whey. Another example was when my sourdough starter got too vinegary from mismanagement I started a new one with fresh whole wheat flour and a big shred of fresh cabbage leaf. Worked like a charm. I think the modern trend of adding large amounts of whey to everything was the fault of Sally Fallon, the meat crazy extremist that started the so called Weston A Price Foundation (which bares no relation to Dr. Weston Price). In the last 16 months I've fermented everything but the kitchen sink (well that too, but I started cleaning it more now) Nearly everything was a success to some degree or other The one marked failure was salt free fermenting of mashed up squash leaves. .... dont ask. A good tasty and frugal trick I invented was on cabbage plants, take away the head and your left with outer leaves that people usually compost or feed to hogs. I fermented those without salt (salt could be added) and with as little added liquid as was reasonable, then I drained it- used the juice as the liquid in making sourdough bread which was great, dried the cabbage leaf solids (which made my house smell like butter biscuits for days) and I use it as.. well half way between a vegetable and spice in making sour breads. It could probably be adapted into strongly flavored meat dishes too. Who knew cabbage was hiding a spice in its leaves.

Even setting aside the fact that the context of potted plants in a organic soil is completely different than plants in the wild in soils with a ~0.1 to 2% organic content, looking at just osmotic pressure to the exclusion of all else isnt likely to work out very well. If I loose a bunch of blood I'll be happy if a doctor decides to pump me full of 0.9% saline... but if the guy decides instead to pump me up with 1.2% formic acid because it has the same osmotic pressure we'd have some problems! You'll give them chloride toxicity and you'll change the chemical structure of the soil and the distribution of soil microbes. Granted you might not kill them, I've done crazy stuff to plants and not had them die, but dont be surprised if your experiment fails. Get the ephedra in the ground and it'll start growing. The peganums are already showing quite a bit of stress. I like the blue aquarium gravel.

One of the most common mindsets I encounter which will assure a repeat of this horror scenario is typified by the opinion "well we have to have power, you wouldnt want to burn more coal would you!?!" As long as nations mindlessly grasp to their infantile obsession with flagrantly excessive power consumption things like fukushima, hanford, and chernobyl will continue to happen. And happen more often as the universally unsound nuclear infrastructure ages. Its bad enough, as a westerner, constantly watching people cheeseburger themselves and their children to death but this nuclear power fixation is murdering children thousands of miles distant from the mindlessly self destructive cultures wallowing in their own degenerate pleasure seeking. Your grandchildren are being knowingly maimed and killed so the japanese can be momentarily amused by pretty colors. More rational and moral nations should band together and force the affluent nations to stop throwing away their lives for a mere orgasmic flash of sparkly lights.

What is an actual traditional recipe? I've never seen one quoted. Obviously ancient china, mongolia, and russia would not have had the white sugar most everyone uses. Emperors and wealthy regional governors may have been able to afford two cups of honey every week of the year but the advertizing hints that it was used by lots of people. Was it A. oryzae fermented rice liquid (the sake precursor) that typically served as the carbohydrate source? That would make modern kombucha quite a different critter, like comparing coca-cola to kvass.

Not every warm dry area is salt flats. Three ppm chloride doesnt count as 'saline'. Peganum grows like a weed 200 to 1,000 miles inland sheltered by multiple mountain ranges in soils with 0 to 8 ppm chloride. I just dont think growing them in saline will be the trick your looking for.

Just because a species can tolerate something doesnt mean its required. 0.25% saline in potted plants goes radically beyond 'traces' of salt. Salinity in my local soils and rivers is very low and both Peganum and Ephedra grow just fine. I can even transplant the Peganums around and still get a full seasons growth from them after. As for growing in pots, my guess is the problems can mostly be attributed to too much organics and too much moisture.

I think its choosing a new number of ribs

I like the polycephalic pseudo-cristata looking ones, its almost like theyre working toward a crest equivalent to the clumping TBM. That would be just dripping with awesomeness

I just re-read this whole thread and I noticed something. Iron. Some awesome flowering action is going on in red clay soil. Plant root exudates can free iron from that. Some nice flowering is going on in black clays, those can have iron. Blood and bone has been mentioned as being correlated to good flowering events, that gear is 0.5% iron. I jumped on google earth and looked at peruvian mountains near cities that Trichs are named after, lots of soil in those cactusy areas is stained orange or red from iron. Is there any additional support for this hypothesis?

So last year I was studying S. miltiorrhiza and S. przewalskii ('sha-vahl-ski-eye', that took me an hour to figure out). To summarize their pharmacognostic utility, the root is a tonic that improves peripheral and coronary circulation and works to slow or reverse cardiovascular disease. Theyve got two groups of goodies, Tashinones (lipophilic) and the Salvianolic acids (hydrophilic). The tashinones do some of the circulation improving stuff and the salvianolic acids are nifty antioxidants that reduce LDL oxidizability and similar antioxidant stuff. Now, traditionally its only the root thats used but I like to squeeze plants for all their worth so I also researched the leaves. They lack the tashinones but have the salvianolic acids in fair quantity. I couldnt find a trace of evidence that anyone had ever ate or drank the leaf, just speculations that the leaf 'waste' could be refined into drugs. But theyre Salvias so I figured I wouldnt die from a tea, it just might taste bad, and I went ahead and planted some S. miltiorrhiza seeds. So, yeah, now the point. The tea was good! Like seriously, it smelled and tasted like a broadleaf spice sage variety of some kind. A fairly well known medicinal herb whos foliage could be expected to at least be edible, and is related to spice and tea herbs, and apparently no one in history had ever tried it. I got suspicious and dug up a plant, and I'll be damned, it had the unusual red taproots of S. miltiorrhiza and S. przewalskii. I guess I got an authentic batch of seeds. Has anyone else tried it? If you have a plant rub a leaf, if it smells like sage give it a go. It mixes well with dried lemon balm for an unsweetened tea or will make a cuppa coffee all masculine and stuff.

That is one sexy penis you have, zelly. I didnt even know they could flower.

The alkaloid, probably not. In its native salt form the Heimia alkaloids are water soluble and non-volatile. They are sensitive to both acid and base (including ammonia), but can be precipitated with sodium bicarbonate to form a non-volatile solid precipitate. The alkaloids have been clinically demonstrated to be bioactive, but they were never demonstrated to be the only bioactive component. So if you have loads and loads and want to play, perhaps heap ferment fresh herb until it smells sweet and try to extract the sweet?

Yeah, yellow variegation just looks diseased to me. Imagine you were about to go down on someone and their fun bits had yellow variegation, it would be an automatic turn off. I'm with nitrogen, I'll hold out for the cactus covered in blue lightning bolts and red star bursts

Stronger sedatives/hypnotics arent much my thing, but from my readings you might want to investigate Corydalis spp. (like C. yanhusuo sold at chinese medicine shops) and Erythrina spp. (like E. mulungu or the native aussie ones), both are also pain killers. I've seen folks here growing and using both. tst also found that a precipitate formed in Heimia processing, if taken in isolation, is a hypnotic sedative he described as being like a sleeping pill in nature with little other effect.

Dose was too much for your body. The ideal scenario is for it to 'disturb' the sleep cycle without actually waking you up. Its effectively a stimulant you can fall asleep on, but too high a dose will just keep waking you up. Even without awakening repeatedly its still tiring, IME. Cinnamon works similarly for some people and is much gentler.

Thats the marketing line lots of people were raised with. Its funny, all the 60 yr olds I know who were raised thinking daily multivitamins improve health have diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, allergies. Modern research shows that multivitamin users have shorter lifespans. Wasnt it Hippocrates who said "Let food be thy medicine" Thats what the dairy industry would love for us to believe

Because people put them in their back gardens and greenhouses to keep them from being stolen You should take a good look at benny's exploits, his garden is located north of you! [benny's]

My introduction was basically the same, out frolicking on a wild island and I found a bottle with the cache gear inside under a log. I thought it would be fun if there was a ethnobotany equivalent, like instead of a site giving the coords for caches it gave ethnobotanical clues too, like