Auxin

I've done similar to that threads tek. In that seedling graft thread they cut off the roots and left some stock areoles on, like a miniature graft using unrooted stem cuts, what I did was to grow some Echinocactus texensis (very large and meaty seedlings), leave them potted, cut at just below the cotylodons, pop the seedling scions on top, and weight them on with a strip of plastic with coins stacked on the end or a strip of latex thread-sealing tape stretched over each one and taped to the pot sides (great stuff to use for peres graft straps too, and reusable). True hypocotyl graft. I got 2/3 success despite them still being in dirt and astros grafted as such grew 4 times as fast as ungrafted seedlings. Essentially grafting nothing but a more vigorous and less rot prone taproot on.

I had the same idea a while back. I tried grafting a trich on to Echinopsis chamaecereus (Peanut Cactus) and grafting that to pereskiopsis, it exploded 20 pups and rejected the trich to feed them Next time I'll leave out the peres or cut off any areole as it pupped faster than I could cut pups off. Stuff I've considered doing is centered on small guys from the trich tribe Echinopsis mamillosa, a little guy, globose to short cylindrical depending on variety/subspecies, possibly flowering at 8cm dia. Hardier selections exist. Echinopsis silvestrii (another 'Peanut Cactus') small and easy. Offsets a lot tho. Lobivia arachnacantha syn. Echinopsis ancistrophora ssp arachnacantha easy spring/summer flowerer, a tolerant 'beginners cactus', flowers < 4 cm diam, tendency to offset Echinopsis subdenudata Globose, which might be a limiter, looks like a T. terscheckii before it goes columnar but with scopulicola spines for easier grafting and pup excision, flowers when small. Trichocereus candicans syn Echinopsis candicans, I've variously heard them reported as fast growers that are easy to flower and slow growers for trichs. They flower when 50-90 cm in height and never get huge but form clumps instead, which would have to be restricted. Stems to 10 cm diam.

Thats how I phased out my 400w, I made a modular dual array 8 bulb hanging daylight CFL light with reflectors all out of scrap metal, wire from broken appliances, and salvaged light fixtures. I can optionally break it down to make two free standing light bars on scrap metal legs. Be creative (and have a fire extinguisher near by ) What, and how much, were you feeding them in the month before they flowered?

So that rules out mutagenic potential being transmitted by chloroplast DNA or apomixis That leaves heritable nuclear DNA traits and the possibility of a seemingly otherwise harmless mutagenic microbe or virus as the possibilities, ya? Has anyone got monsters from Psycho0 X N1 ? I'm a bit behind the herd as I had to finish another project before I could give these babies the attention they deserve. All my seeds are sprouted now tho and the frantic mass cloning of Pereskiopsis has begun

Not a freak yet, but I'm optimistic. It got grasshopper bit, another bridge of the same size got the same damage and grew out normally, so I hope I'm seeing the origination of a monster.

You tell us you have orgasms stabbing needles in to your foot and you want serious advice? lol If I were me, my first instinct would be to piss on my feet in the shower and rub tea tree oil into the bottom of my foot after drying it off post-shower... and to not expect results in under a month. If pure tea tree oil roughs up your skin dilute it a bit with a edible oil. If you have an orally active anti-microbial anti-fungal herb handy, include that the first week. Get at least moderate exercise and eat lymph stimulating foods when available. Bitter lettuce, gobo root, dandelion root, the chicories. Thats where I'd start while continuing to research more established treatments.

Well since the itch is orgasmic, and your into kinky sex, and we're on the internet, the solution is obvious... Get a midget girl in BDSM leathers to pleasure your itchy spot in graphic and perverse ways on camera and start a members only website! $5 per itchgasm vid, $45 for a lifetime membership The only question is what permit you might need for a barking midget in a dog collar to chew your itchy spot or punish it into submission with metal dental cleaning gear? ...if you have an italian language version of the site be sure to tell me, as I know a couple guys who may subscribe.

The shaferi monstrose is great, like a cactus a bikie would have, the crest form is like the polar opposite- it looks like a great candidate for the name 'Granny Lips' Cactus MILF porn

I was ponderin on that last night. If the mutation in my plants really did spread from (flowering) radicchio to cucurbits it must have been either air borne or in little shreds of dead leaves, it couldnt have been water-borne unless it came in via my irrigation water. Its not hard to imagine that fungal spores, viruses, or endosporulating bacteria could ride the pollen looking for damaged plant tissues to infect. Just to be thorough I'll cryo-store some dessicated pollen and mix some with capsicum pollen for a capsicum selfing to see if the progeny mutate.

So its well known that some bacteria, fungi, and viruses can induce fasciation and in lab settings these critters have been isolated, characterized, and tested on tissue cultures. What about real world 'in the field' exploitation of them, any successes? I'm curious because I believe I may have encountered such a pathogen This spring a radicchio went cristate, all growing into spirals and stuff. Then the two next to it did. Then I started seeing fasciated flowers on my zucchini bushes 20 feet away. Then it was fasciated styles in capsicum flowers. If some invisible little critter is doing this I want to harness it before it wanders off so I can use it, mainly on cacti if its compatible. Inventing practical methods of doing so without a microbiology laboratory is the interesting part. My current attempt is quite basic. I took a fan shaped flower-stem end from a strongly effected radicchio plant, sprinkled it with water and ground to a paste with a mortar and pestle, mixed that up in water and used it to soak Hylocereus undatus seeds, Flax seeds, and washed Tomato seeds straight from a tomato. For the first two, after several hours, I planted them just by pouring the juice and seed slurry into appropriate soil. The tomato seeds are an attempt to preserve it, I poured off the liquid and dried them. I'll be quite pleased if such a crude procedure works on even 1% of the treated seeds. What would be ways to improve the concept? Expose seeds and then rapidly increase tempt to give fungi and bacteria a better chance to get into the seeds? Expose already germinating seeds or small seedlings? Put a drop on a cactus baby and poke the tip with a fine pin? lol I've seen fasciating pathogens in trees a few times before, but never anything like this where it seems to jump from chicory family to cucurbits and possibly even solanum family.

Yeah, I live downstream of a nuke plant thats leaking so bad the cleanup efforts may pass a trillion dollars in costs so I can relate. There are identified pathogens that do it, Rhodococcus fascians comes to mind (note the species name) it can produce cytokinin and auxin and induce an antigibberellin effect in infected tissues. It could be my plants got mutated just by random insect damage or the department of energys incompetence, but lacking any proof I'm gonna play with this thing Even a remote chance of being able to induce crests in seeds of known genetics is worth the effort.

But what isnt clear, as far as I've seen, is if those fruit contain seed that result from selfing or apomixis (agamospermy). It would be a easy thing to test, take a breeding pair whos progeny will be obvious hybrids and just do the cement tek but using the other pollen in place of the self pollen. If the offspring are hybrids the selfing tek is quite possibly selfing, but if the calcium hydroxide altered hybridization produces selfed-looking offspring its almost certainly also causing apomixis in the selfing attempts.

That sounds very unlikely. The pH range wouldnt be very wide and I've never heard of people repeatedly finding genetically distinct cacti unequivocally of the same species that cant cross. That would mean if the achievable pH range were even a broad ±0.5 from the average the difference would have to be precise to less than 0.01 of a pH, probably closer to 0.001 to give each plant its own pH 'barcode'. The tiniest environmental fluctuation (like a bushfire 100 kilometers off, or rabbit pee 100 meters off) would bring it outside that range and trigger selfing. It was my vague and crude understanding that it came down to protein markers on the pollen grains that told a plant if it was self or other. Sometimes pollen from a 'other' with distinct dominant traits is killed with ethanol or UVC and mixed with self pollen to trick a plant into opening up its defenses and allowing a selfing event to occur. Thats the simplified version of what I've read in papers about various non-cactus crop families, anyway. In the demonstrated cases of calcium hydroxide promoting selfing, if apomixis has been ruled out, it could be that the extreme of pH just fucked up marker or receptor. Achievable pollen tube length can also be relevant if flower morphology is significantly different.

If growing from seed why not go ahead and grow far too many and challenge with the max levels of ferts and water. Over the generations the plants would thus be selected for tomato-plant-like feeding and growth Last year I fed an assortment of paches, bridges, macros, terscheckiis, hybrids thereof, and one group of glaucas with 1/4 strength 15-30-15 every second week throughout the growing season. Not the slightest problem except, perhaps, it promoting the abortion of small pups when in subsequent dormancy. This year I'm giving them that every week, so far the only effect seems to be rapid growth.

Skeptical... So it removed fluoride from solution. But did that make it not be bioavailable? If it went into the tulsi solids groovie. But 8 hours? It took 8 hours!?! That opens up the possibility that the tulsi was an inocculant providing bacteria which trapped the fluoride. That may fool the tests but the fluoride may be freed back up as you digest the bacteria. Hmm, found a paper [*] on page 3 it says 95% was removed in 20 minutes when fresh leaves were used. Less was removed in an unspecified time (8 hours, maybe) with dry leaves. Bacteria. Also, just tulsi? Tulsi may be fine and well in india but other stuff is ubiquitous in other places. If the fluoride went into the solids I wonder what else would work. Lemon balm, thyme, cabbage, henbit, drawf mallow, common grass? Interesting line of research.

It sounds like you got the 'false Calea' Even by chinese medicine and ayurveda standards Calea and Andrographis are among the most bitter medicines in existence, lol. Andrographis is called 'The King of Bitters' for a reason, and Calea is equally bitter but with a nicer buttery flavor.

At one point I got me onea those UV-C sterilizer lamps and irradiated a bunch of 1-5 day old seedlings, 80% died and the remainder were scarred all over. None of the ones that continued to live and grow were mutants. I suspect it was just too late, too many cell divisions had occured. If the seed coats could be removed after a 1 hr soak that might have a better chance, better still would be to irradiate pollen with UV-C. Perhaps some sort of mutagen. It might not be hard or particularly dangerous to form a non-volatile nitrosamine in solution and use it to presoak seeds. Something like N-nitrosophenylepherine would be easy to do but N-methyl-N-nitrosotryptamine would be funnier (and more mutagenic) though it may require a cosolvent. Using (RS)-N-methyl-N-nitroso-3-phenyl-3-[4-(trifluoromethyl)phenoxy]propan-1-amine to make a monstrose bridgesii would just be ironic ...no prozac in my collection tho.

Individual tea partiers dont surprise me too much... look hard enough and you can find a blindly ignorant fanatical bigot in any large group. The incomprehensible bit is that these people get elected. I sometimes wonder if people vote for the worst, most offensive candidate just so they'll look good in comparison. The bush administration, for instance, provided a great many people the opportunity to proudly say they were at least as smart as the president.

I've put thousands of trich seedlings in the freezer, it doesnt mutate 'em. And some survive

[1] I disagree with their assertion that mucous is slimy and gross, I find it can provide hours of fun, but the finding that bacteriophage symbiotes act as a segment of the human immune system is pretty nifty. Lots of potential research directions for this one.

If anything I expect they will find that an induced lack of bacteriophages may promote immune diseases. With our bacterial symbionts our immune system uses them as a sort of testing ground to train the immune system not to attack itself and excessive hygiene, overly sterile, low fiber, and artificial foods, antibiotics, etc. are hypothesized to contribute to a general deregulation of immune function that promotes arthritis, allergies, MS, etc. because they take away that training ground (as well as other bad things). It wouldnt surprise me if eventually we start discovering that some common materials.. drugs and cleaners and fire retardants, etc.. that we're exposed to weakens the bacteriophage populations and leads not only to more susceptibility to the bacteria they fought but also an adaptive immune system less 'educated' in dealing with harmful viruses. For instance, in the absence of pneumonia the flu generally kills otherwise healthy people by means of cytokine storm, an immune response that spirals out of all rational control. Might it be that we're inadvertently killing off our bacteriophages and thus increasing likelihood of such a reaction? Thats one of the questions I hope are addressed over the next ten years of research.

That post may attract the wrong type of american attention, gr33n One tactic may be to use one of those UVC sterilizing lamps to kill 95% of pre-soaked seeds. If large enough numbers are done there may be some interesting survivors. Its also a method that wont get you sent to guantanamo bay for 67 years.

I wonder if hormone tricks might increase monster induction. Auxin transport inhibitors (the hormones, not the bastards that wont let me thumb a ride) have been documented to promote fasciation in plants and adding 10,000 volts to that might be worth an attempt, as might including an anti-gibberellin like paclobutrazol in the mix.

I'm still looking for an effective method, lol. Cutting, rooting, and doubling every year doesnt work the way it might in ones imagination, not in our climates. Theres a time and place for cloning, but beyond that it will just stop progress. Four to six months is barely enough time for a plant to recover from being cut in half, much less grow significantly. What I've done the last few years is plant in plastic pots with big drain holes and plant the whole damn pot in the ground, then stop watering them in sept and bring inside by october. Some roots go out the bottom. My plants are at least getting bigger this way despite being dormant from late-sept through april. This year I had too many duplicates and more new plants so I bare rooted a bunch of scop and PC dups and planted them next to their potted brethren as an experiment. Plan is to dig up in fall and those I keep will be stored bare root in empty pots over winter. It'll be a while before I have the results in. Tricky bit with USDA zones is they are an average. 5b may average to lows of -10°F but that doesnt mean it IS the low. It could be 0° or -20°F I'm zone 7a, thats listed as 0°F, this last winter my actual low was 12° and a few years ago it was -12°F (-24.5°C) So just because someone might report that their terscheckii survived a -10 night, that doent mean its 5a safe. I'm toying with breeding for colder temps but I hope to be moved to some place far warmer before any real progress could be made (which could be anything from 20 to 160 years).

I found this report interesting. Click [Link] for a picture guide for being a sexy hairy man.