Fractalhead

Hi fellow Being, I totally reccommend you take a look at WWOOFing as a way of getting out and about through the country experiencing a wide range of lifestyles. You might have heard of it already. It stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms. Basically, you pay a joining fee (about $40 for twelve months) and they send you out a book that is chockas full of organic farms that are WWOOF hosts, each with a bit of a description of what goes down at the place. Then there will be a phone number and/or address so you can get in contact with them about the possibility of staying there for a while. The deal is generally meant to be half a days work (4 hrs) on the farm for a full days board, including food and shelter etc. Its ideally all about sharing culture and learning new ways. The farms have to be organic or almost totally organic to get on the list, and many of them are way into alternative lifestyles/self-sufficiency/permaculture/sustainability. My wife and I have wwoofed a bit around Far north Queensland, and i have wwoofed at a really good permaculture eco-village in Dunsborough, WA (if you do a search for the "eco-village network" you should find it on their site). Man, one place we worked at up north, we were living with a huge familiy with lots of little kids in this beautiful rainforest valley where they grew all kinds of rare tropical fruits like mangosteens and duriens and stuff. we were working for four hours a day repairing the holes in their nets that keep the birds and bats out of their fruit trees. then we had the rest of the day to cruise about and munch shopping bags of lychees and enjoy ourselves reading cool books and playing with the kids. And guess what... while we were talking to our hosts about their brugmansia tree, we got onto shamanic/psychedelic plants and they said, "oh... a friend of ours up the road collects those sort of things..." we couldn't believe our luck. we gave the guy a ring and that afternoon we were sitting in some beautiful tropical rainforest block talking to someone who could relate to us about these sacred plants. he showed us all his ayahuasca plants (B. caapi, and P. catharginensis), his san pedros, his Salvia divinorums and his Turbina corymbosa. We sat for hours talking about DMT, life, plants and having control of our futures... It was great! And to think that it was all because we went WWOOFing. The address for WWOOF Australia is: www.wwoof.com.au if you want to check out some spiritual communes, you can order their spiritual commune book as well which i think is an extra five bucks or something. there are thousands of wwoof hosts all around australia, and you can travel australia with hardly any money. good luck dude, fractal

Hi people, We have access to a huge vine here and always have large quantities of fresh seeds available for sale at very reasonable prices. here are some photos... sorry there weren't any flowers when i took the photos. check out the stem! Email me if you're interested... cya fractal. [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 01 September 2001).]

I'm a chamomile person myself. I reckon it smells nice, tastes nice, and boy... does it work. After using the fresh flowers of our backyard plant, I can hardly go back to that dried up crap (unless I'm desperate) I find that if i'm stressed or anxious, i only need to throw about 6-10 freshly picked chamomile flowers in a plunger of boiled water for about 10 minutes and 1, 2, 3... ahhhhhhhh reeeeeeelaxation plus. Often it makes me giggle heaps like other herbs. Does anyone know if the active ingredients of chamomile are terpenoids? hmmm, i wonder how much chamomile you'd need to overdose. Sometimes when we have heaps we find it disturbs our sleep (almost stimulating). Mmmmm I thoroughly recommend the Chamamellow (only the fresh stuff of course) fractal

Hi Smylin, I can organise as many Mimosa pudica plants as you are likely to want. I also have a few Atropa belladonna seeds to trade. Email me Fractal

Another fantastic idea from the rev! I reckon it would be great to produce a drug guide that gave facts and teks for the whole range of plant drugs. Not just entheogens and not just your ecinaceas and chamomiles but all the plants that have played a major role in the survival and learning of humankind. I reckon if we did it really well, we could publish it properly and sell it in nurseries, computer stores, markets, video stores, and everywhere. Might even make some money. We could have little video clips showing how to do all the prop techniques. Maybe have a series of video clips called "Reville's Cooking Show" We could do a bit of the old... Rev: "Heres a block of mycelium we prepared earlier..." Jo-bloggs: "Wow! you made that? What is it did you say? My ceiling?" Rev: "Well Jo, let me show you what will come out of this strange looking block of fungal tissue... try this delicious shiitake soup..." (Little does Jo know, these shiitakes are Revilles new genetically engineered psilocybin/psilocin containg variety) Jo has a big long sip... Jo-bloggs: Mmmmmmmm!! Reville, you are amazing! To think! Anyone can grow these expensive little mushrooms at home with some of your premium quality spore syringes and this CD. Rev: Ok Jo, i think we'd (you'd) better go and sit down and wait till the next course is ready. ......60mins later Rev: Ok ladies and gentleman... here is a person-under-the-influence-of-a-particular-serotonin-analogue we prepared earlier. Jo, do you have anything to say? Jo: My Reville! what big TEETH you have!! Rev: All the better to EAT YOU WITH!!! He he he! Jo: AAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHH!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!! GET ME OUT OF THIS TINY HOUSE!!! THE WALLS ARE CAVING IN!!!!!! Maybe we'd have to cut the video off there or maybe earlier. But think "Revilles cooking show" Has some real potential. If we made the CD really well... we could sell it for sure. Maybe we could do the information preservation thing now and allow more time for the really professional plant guide. Maybe the big one could be called "The Ethnobotanopaedia" or something weird like that. It would be the all time effort. But maybe we don't want half the worlds Jo bloggs knowing what power we have with these plants as our allies... Anyway, definitely food for thought reville. good on ya. Fractalhead [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 09 May 2001).]

I was just wondering if there is any demand for Sida rhombifolia plant material. I know it is a widespread weed but I don't know how common it is down south. There is plenty growing up here in vast areas of weed infested land. If anyone needs/wants large amounts i can probably organise this for a trade.

Thanks theo, you beat me too it Yeah, I looked up the tree in some books, and you are quite right. I had a feeling it was Chorisia not Corisia and Floss not Cotton. Thats interesting it has been used as an ayahuasca additive. Might keep a couple of seeds for myself Which parts to they add do you know? I wonder if they use the fluff for anything. I swear they could make great cushions out of it. I'll fix my profile so its got my email addess on it. Sorry about that. I thought i put it on when i joined. I'll email you soon. for now, my email address is: [email protected] cheers, Fractal

Hey Earthalchemist, I've finally got into town and found the tree i mentioned growing on the esplanade of cairns. it had been a while since i saw it dropping seed pods around the place and i hoped it was still doing so. Luckily, there was ONE seed pod left on a branch about 20 ft in the air. The trunk was practically unclimbable so i looked around for something decently heavy to throw up and knock it off. After about twenty gos i knocked it hard enough to bring it down. The species if i remember correctly is Chorisia speciosa in the family Bombacaceae. I think that's the correct spelling for Chorisia. I didn't have a pen to write it down but i know the rest of the species name is correct. Its native to Brazil and its common name is Floss-Silk Tree. So if you want it, i've got one seed pod, including silk and seeds. I don't know anything about the best way to propagate these trees. I don't even know if the seeds will be viable. They look perfectly healthy and they look pretty tough like they would last a fairly long time. I can send them down if you like. I don't know if its a good idea to send the whole pod without putting it through quarantine which is a pain in the arse. I can just put the seeds in a box so they don't get squashed. Some seeds i would love are belladonna, mandrake, some varieties of datura or brugmansia or maybe some tobacco seeds (oh, or maybe some seeds for Erythoxylum novo-granatense if you have some (hardly a fair swap)). As you can see, i like the solanaceae. I want to leave the garden of this rental place full of amazing plants that make the next tenants think 'whoa! check that out!!' but i'll have to put some signs up saying 'WARNING: DO NOT EAT THIS PLANT!'. Of course that might be like a red cloak to a bull for some people around here. I think i might put in a diviners sage and a sign saying "SPECIAL SALVIA - LAYING DOWN RECOMMENDED - COMBINE WITH BABY WOODROSE (AROUND THE SIDE)" No. perhaps those plants don't need the publicity. I'll just leave out the signs for woodrose and salvia. Anyway... You can email me if you want to let me know what you want to do. Lots of love, Fractalhead. [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 01 May 2001).]

I am soon going to collect some cuttings of Doryphora sassafras, D. aromatica, and Daphnandra repandula from up here. I'm not going to go digging up roots. Will just try to propagate stem pieces. I love growing cuttings of cool plants I find about the place. Its cool watching them shoot little roots out. Every day I come home and check all the jars to see how my cuttings are going. I've got a Brugmansia sp. cutting that's been sitting in a jar of water for about five months its still growing happily (although slowly) and it has heaps of roots. I was stoked to see my Argyreia cuttings have just poked out some little root shoots. Anyway, I'll share my experiences of trying to grow sassafras from cuttings soon hopefully. Oh and has anyone heard of Duboisia hopwoodii or D. myoporoides growing from cuttings? I suspect its possible, given that lots of Solanaceaeous plants seem to be easily grown from cuttings provided you've got the right bit. Might go and collect these while i'm out collecting the Sassies if anyone's interested? Are there any other plants that grow up here that people think I should collect some genetic diversity for? I would like to make the most of this year in terms of collecting things because I'm going back to Perth next year. Good luck with the Sass. Fractalhead.

Hmmm... that Bombax malabaricum, is that a tree that has woody seed pods (like a huge pea pod) about 10-15cm long stuffed full of white fluffy silky, woolly, downey stuff that you could use to stuff pillows if you wanted to? (actually thought of doing this because its really nice and soft)) I know where a tree of the above description is but I don't know its name. Could be another Bombax maybe? Its just a stab in the dark. You might want to grow this one anyway. Might be able to start up an environmentally friendly, organic pillow making business. If it sounds like the one, I can get you heaps of seeds because there are quite a few growing around the place up here in Cairns. I would be willing to go and collect them and send em down for a trade.