JumpedAngel

i suppose, if you are a local person, then you might try http://www.kuranga.com.au and drop in, they have a pamphlette that they distribute with a list of 17 non-local backyard bush-food plants which they distribute and also a list of some 26 local usefull plants which they would most likely stock also, for example i bought my quandong and parasitic host plants there. My own web site will give you a neccesary lesson on acacia tears, if you are interested in bush survival foods and i've also found the following sites to be usefull. http://home.vicnet.net.au/~greenlnk/p-usage.htm http://www.rumbalara-e.schools.nsw.edu.au/...cker/Intro1.htm http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/bushtucker/index.html http://sres.anu.edu.au/associated/fpt/nwfp/nwfp.html one thing i want to mention though is that i'm not really impressed with this aboriginal claim to local plant knowledge, and i'm certainly not impressed with the idea of dying a horrible death out there because some tight-arse claims knowledge to be his/hers personal property!.

the very worst tobacco i had was russian (iron curtain days), wouldn't it be wonderfull to experiment with possibly the most addictive substance ever known to mankind without fear of becoming entraped, such enticing thoughts still occur to me long after that lengthy love affair with the 'evil weed' has ended, you dont even get stoned from it but it becomes your overriding impulse, have you ever asked yourself why that stuff? why not anything else?, you have to admit, there is a mystery there, haveing now smoked a 'large' quantity of pituri with apparent impunity, i now want to experiment with various tobaccos for a while, then, if my former addiction to tobacco is renewed, i will attempt to beat it a second time, again using pituri just to be sure that it was not just some happy accident the last time. the gnome down the road (JumpedCatholic) was thinking that the tincture might make an interesting party drink, provided you could keep the dose under control then your major legal concern might actually be something as ridiculous as haveing to contend with liquor laws, might be easier all round if it was just a fizzy drink with no alcohol, dont laugh, remember coca-cola?, but i wouldnt be at all upset if it just turned out to be usefull as an antidote to tobacco addiction.

thanx dudes i had to re-read the original post, i can't believe its been almost 9 months without tobacco, for curiosities sake, yes i still smoke (between 3 and 5 per day), smoking itself is a habbit, but i'm still not sure i want to stop it all together (can't see that as being a good idea), recently i read that a small amount of smoked brug. can help decongest my head making it easier to pop my ears and not risk preasure damage when scuba diving (long term problem of mine) so i guess i'll be trying that, aside from that, over the last 9 or so months i've continued smoking Convolvulus sabatius, although it no longer gives that initial mild buzz, i've mixed it with cloves, having found a cheap source, and lately tried goodenia ovata but that stuff really sux, hope to get back to the desert in a short while and collect some more pituri (still keeping my fingers crossed), once that is done, i will get back to some tobacco, but hope to try mainly the native ones... cheers and thanx for the suggestions... nothing as cool as when someone who has actually used the stuff writes a reply

Thanx guys - shall don the ninja suit soon

Hi t st tantra, is this what you mean?

Thanks spaced and rev one final question rev, how easily will a brug transplant?, the people at that place are renting and have no idea about gardening etc. i am afraid this brug will go down the same road as the two local trumpet lillies did and just disappear one day, its right next door to a primary school and some idiot is sure to label it a poisonous plant.

your not talking about these things are you? i just managed to rescue them from the bin but, i do take prisoners, so there are a few cuttings just started too.

Its not my plant rev. but i'm happy to give it a whirl if your willing to walk me through it and tell me what to do. incidently - i should walk the dog more often, amongst other things there is an american dogwood down the road that i've been keeping an eye on, and i spotted another solanum, god i love spring, can ya tell me what this thing is

Hi infinite_monkey are you still looking for brug pollen? i found this thing growing down the road today, it is producing pollen ATM. pm me if you want some

I saw one of those trendy new-age cooking programs not long ago where they fermented one of those greek style 'maggot' cheeses from unpasturized goats milk with the bile/rennin? from a goats intestines? which they had previously slaughtered/butchered, had to wonder where the actual insect larvae came from in this preperation?, the flies?. also remained amazed to realize that the bacteria was able to survive the goats guts and in fact resides there. I have an interest in moulds etc. but its getting away from the cheese thread a bit so i sent it off in this direction ----> http://www.shaman-australis.com.au/cgi-bin...c;f=12;t=000459

I'm interested in moulds, but being a nuts and bolts type of bloke and never having had any real biology/botany schooling, i still struggle with basic things like the differences between mould, yeast, fungi, bacteria, enzymes, etc. the definitions and explanations can be confusing. arn't moulds just the fruiting bodies/structures of a particular bacteria?, arnt enzymes, chemical converters created by the bacteria for a specific job?, arnt fungi and yeasts closly related? arnt yeasts and bacteria closely related? some interesting links to ponder:- http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/zymology http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title...&action=history http://www.accessexcellence.org/LC/SS/ferm...background.html http://smccd.net/accounts/case/antibiotics.html i've already written a little bit about molassas conversion through bacterial digestion here and/or at EA (butyric acid), probobly didn't mention the mould floating on the top (i think my last wife left me when she found a tray of this stuff growing in the study?), there was another few of these kitchen tek type recipes for chelating agents that i came across in my research at that time, one of them was for lactic acid, another was for tammarinic? acid (chelating agent => rust converter), the recipe for lactic acid was quite simple, 1 gallon of water, 1 pint of milk and 1 slice of (white toasted) bread, mix together and allow wild bacteria to colonize and convert (few days), this will supposedly produce enough lactic acid to de-rust a large number of metal parts. rev - citric acid + milk has always been a formula for curdled milk + stomach ache, i dont know if it will 'select' certain bacteria above others and thereby act as a selective firewall also. (checkout the second link above) some moulds are specific to a given micro-climate/location to the extent that they can not be readily relocated, one of my favourites of these lives in the Tokaji wine-making region in central europe which until not-long-ago was behind the so-called iron curtain, the product being a type of wine, the thing that i enjoyed most about those bad old days was the ridiculous currency conversion rates which made it possible for an average bloke, such as myself, to be able to afford to gargle a bottle of this stuff for breakfast each day, nowadays you could easily spend a couple of hundred bux to sample such an indulgance. this mould will penetrate the cork of any type of wine stored in those cellars and give it a peculiar flavour irrespective of the grape type used for making the wine, or so i have been told, certain fortified white wines known as 'puttonos' are made which specifically concentrate or strengthen this flavour, up to a maximum of 8 putton, this being the highest grade ie. an 8 'putton' wine is one where 1 barrel of wine was cured in 8 barrels of sultanas in such a cellar under the influence of the said mould, there are the lower grades also, 5, 3 and 1 putton. known for centuries as 'the king of wines and the wine of kings', no-one yet has managed to steal the mould or learn its secrets. more recently, i was looking at another interesting fermentation process, a traditional dill-pickle recipe in which the whole dill plant is used, i suspect that the particular species of bacteria required to ferment that certain flavour is associated directly with the roots of the plant, toasted white bread is included in the recipe for the first day of fermentation to help 'breed-up' this specific bacteria, the bread is then discarded and fermentation allowed to proceed. as a note of caution, i would like to urge anyone thinking of expermenting with fermentation processes to extreme caution in using a well ventilated area, in the first place there are often volatile end products involved such as acetone in the case of molassas fermentation, in the second place there are other as yet still unknown volatile by-products involved (possibly in the gaseous phase) as is evidenced by the two great molassas disasters which occured in the U.S. last century.

Okally dokally, i did a little research on Cordyceps before going back out there yesterday..... "there are species of Cordyceps which attack a wide variety of living organism. Cordyceps capitata and C. ophioglossoides both attack false truffles, growing out of the ground in pine woods as drum-stick or club-shaped bodies up to 10 cm high. Cordyceps militaris, however, feeds off buried insect pupae. The relationship between fungi and insects is, however, quite often beneficial to both sides. One unusual example is that of a Stereum species, the spores of which are stored by the female giant wood wasp (Uroceras gigas) in special glands. As the eggs are laid, spore of the Stereum are also injected into the wood. the spores germinate and digest the wood into a state more suited to the young wasp larvae"... 'The World of Mushrooms' - Orbis There was no sign of the three specimens that i spotted there last time, the only similar thing out there was the one shown below which is again looks like another Ramaria, this was located in a gully nearby, within 1 km, many thanks for your help rev, all there is left to do now is to schedule another trip out there for next winter. (isn't it amazing how interesting wombat shit can be, I admired the specimen below for ages, thinking that it might be some exotic truffle or something before i realized what it was)

question rev how would you make a spore print out of one of these

Rev sounds like he know much more about this than me but at $4/gm they look inviting to me too, hehe, there appears to be hundreds of these things scattered around the globe and i doubt that anyone could id the ones in my dinky photo's. I might go back and grab them just for trials but I have done some googleing and haven't come across anything yet which would help in really id.ing the local ones.

So what are you saying rev?, are you saying these babies are worth going back for?, tell you the truth, I already knew they grew on grubs/larva but wasn't impressed by its ediblity, medical props.?, 5 grams and one greassy duck? viaduck? sounds like horsefeathers to me, (hehe)

Two boletus shrooms from this season, the one on the left may be Boletus pinophilus?, the mystery fungus on the right is mf1. mf2 mf3 mf4... how many can you id? --------------------------------------------------one shot, two shot, three shot, floor

Hi Ed. Just wondering what the price of the second one there may be, and can you tell me a bit more about it. Having already found and experimented with d. hopwoodii in the past, i was wondering if it may be of any use to someone like me. I'm still hoping to get out there again in a little while and am constantly reviewing my resources. Cheers JA PS I just checked, those scelly cuttings I had put in the ground for you and they have rooted, I'll get them in the post for you soon. I got those cuttings you sent and all seem to have taken, the large ed and about half the luke were fermented, I fell ill with a regular annual illness, so couldnt try them, then after resting up a little i got put on a four week course that i'm just finnishing up now.

Oh look, I'm sorry if it reddened your face cause you were trying to cultivate a relationship or something, its just that you face the same story, time and time again, with little more than a few old references and a little speculation, and because it was published in a journal it is called science. Sometimes you want to treat these articles as confirmation of what you already suspected then you realize they are only refering back to the same articles which made you form your original suspicions in the first place. after some years of this gibberish, your head spins and your patience wanes. But yeh, I'm interested in what Adrien comes up with, I would like to know if he is wildcrafting the plants or raising them from seed, I'm about to have yet one more crack at that old batch of seed myself with yet one more new way of raising them, then I hope to have a new batch of seed by the end of the year to start from scratch with.

ok ok, I thought the author might have been getting ripped off, my apologies for that, I still dont like the content though, I mean to say it is still all the same bullshit thats been put out there for the last 200 years, it might have been this and it might have been that and no-one really knows now in 66 pages, good grief mate, how many regurgitations do you need.

ok, i think i know what i have here but would like confirmation please, would you believe that i heard a botanist call this a.implexa?. flowering in April pod/seed flower flower 60x other detailed images are available should they be required.

Sorry guys, here it is and it is valid, 1983, but still available for free:- http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/912411.htm

Good ref. Fractal OK, your opinion is as valid as anyone elses torsten dude, I often struggle with this 'one chemical - one salvation' philosophy so apparent within these circles, too often we may be robbing ourselves of a cultivated cultural experience by extracting or explaining in terms of that 'one' chemical and forsaking others which in combination may not yet be understood, but there it is, just another opinion, dont forget, sally cant always dance either, however, there were two more important things that I wanted to talk about:- Firstly, you must recognise that this is a really good opportunity to do some research of our own, imagine, this time next year we could have an analysis of three plants from different origins, we could be well underway to an analysis of seasonal variability, we might be able to speak more confidently about alkaloid distributions within any one of these three plant chemo-types, we may have a better understanding of the effects of various types of cureing and also ageing effects, it all depends on if we can get organised or not, what do you think?, now is a good time to start negotiations for a scope!, what would you want to include in that study?. Secondly, I am concerned about those copies of 'Oceania Monograph #26' that 'Sydney Exotic Plants' has for sale, the original document can be viewed by the public free of charge at any state library, and I think by law (copyright law), you may photo-copy 10% of each volume at any given time (many monographs in one volume) or the whole lot, 50 years after the authors death, I would like anyone who can date the publication of Monograph #26 to respond to this enquiry now, otherwise I will check this out personally within the next few weeks, sorry guys, I don't want to stop anyone from making the odd buck at someone elses expense, just dont like to see outdated information in the guise of groundbreaking research or current state of the art knowledge. As things stand, this is precisly the sort of documentation Mr T should be trying to put up on this web-site, even if only as 'historically' significant information on a 'for its day' basis.

Thats rigt Mr T, I would like to point out that if that southern chemotype was indeed toxic-poisonous then my gnome as well as certain other gnomes and gnomlettes around these southern parts might well be in cactus city right now, particularly as my own gnome personally accounted for roughly 2 cubic decimeters of the herb over as many months with zero ill effect. :cool: How did you go with the sample Darcy?

mystery, if due settles overhanging surfaces, then maybe :confused: I just thought it looked great, strange things happen in the front yard, I wish I could find it, but I had a photo of myself wearing a sombrero just like that hombre, its the spitting image, but i think this guy is a bit wet behind the gills.