Ymir

More for interest's sake, but worth adding, you can actually overcook agar. If you heat it up too high or for too long you can hydrolyse the agar and it won't set. Back in the day agar was generally sterilized by successive cycles of heating with steam, then cooling, then heating etc (called Tyndallization). This also eliminates the possibility that any sugars will be caramelized. Autoclave/pressure cooking is much faster though

I suspect the nice plate shaped ones growing out of the logs are Tapinella panuoides. The gills look like they're forking in the third pic, and they're a little thin fleshed for Omphalotus.

My Hoodia got rather wet earlier in 2010, and I was worried that it would rot. You can see a little black patch remaining on one of the branches in a few of the pics. So I moved it under cover, then back into full sun this summer. It went nuts! It's been flowering constantly for over a month month now and shows no signs of slowing. It's making the garden smell a little like an abattoir and there is a permanent cloud of flies around it, as well as a few very happy enterprising spiders. Don't know if I'll get any fruits yet, but from the bases of the oldest flowers (which have since dropped off) there are some pea sized lump-oids that haven't withered away yet. Fingers crossed

Grafting these things has always frightened me. If I was really confident of my skills or didn't feel like I would never find one again I might try. Lovely grafting pics BTW Planthelper As for seeds, so far no changes in the hoodia nubbins really. They've continued to be nubbin-oid. You can see where all the flowers were attached, but the structure they came from has just remained like this. I suspect that means no fruit/seeds, considering the length of time since the flowers dropped off, but I'll keep an eye on it anyway. Do you think it's even likely that this would be the site of fruit formation? Would it be more likely that the individual fertilized flowers would form fruits?

Maybe 7 or 8 years. I traded someone from this forum (I think...) for a few seeds a looong time ago. Two or three of them germinated but where swiftly eaten by mice. I babied the last remaining seedling until I was sure it would survive outside. I've never been brave enough to actually put it in the garden bed with my main collection though. But if I get some seeds, and they germinate AND they survive long enough to be planted outside then I suppose I can get enough courage to properly plant it out and let it go nuts.

Thanks! That photo was taken in February, and it fruited up until the beginning of winter. After I went through all the fuzz and picked out all the dried and fresh fruit I ended up with maybe 100 seeds. Each berry has maybe...3 or so seeds in so I guess about 30 berries all in all. I ended up collecting all the fruit and having a bit of a nibble. Quite tasty, surprisingly sweet and very sticky! What I'd love to eventually do, if my stock pups again that is, is source a graft with a different flower colour or at least introduce some genetic diversity into the family and collect the seeds from that.

The original graft is about 4 years old I think, with the 2 other grafts happening last year and the year before that (2008, 2007). It had flowered once or twice in it's first 3 years of growth but all of last year it flowered and fruited continuously, summer and winter. I don't know if it's made the difference but I'd always been extremely cautious when it came to having it in full sun. I'd been told that our Mexican friends burn terribly if not given any shade, but I took a chance and placed it in progressively sunnier and sunnier spots last year. It seemed to acclimatize well, no burning, and just started to flower like mad. I like to think that she had a bit of a back-log that needed to express itself Has anyone else had that experience? Are they more tolerant to full sun then I had been led to believe?

Yeah, no need to worry. I've had a very happy-yote that has split in a few places from time to time. I just make sure that I keep it dry for a week or 2 until the surface is a bit calloused and it seems to pull through. I try to make sure that I don't over-water otherwise it tends to look a little chubby. Not the clearest photo but you can see a split that opened on the left most head and another little one on the big mumma on top.

im with Fenris on this one, Ymir is also a norse mythological figure. In Norse mythology Ymir is the first giant and the father of the race of frost giants. He was created by the hot air from Muspell melting the ice of Niflheim. then from Ymir's sleeping body the first giants sprang forth: one of his legs fathered a son on his other leg while from under his armpit a man and women grew out. The frost kept melting and from the drops the divine cow Audumla was created. From her udder flowed four rivers of milk, on which Ymir fed. The cow itself got nourishment by licking hoar frost and salt from the ice. On the evening on the first day the hair of a man appeared, on the second day the whole head and on the third day it became a man, Buri, the first god. His grandchildren are Odin, Ve and Vili. Odin and his brothers had no liking for Ymir, nor for the growing number of giants, and killed him. In the huge amount of blood that flowed from Ymir's wounds all the giants, except two, drowned. From the slain body the brothers created heaven and earth. They used the flesh to fill the Ginnungagap; his blood to create the lakes and the seas; from his unbroken bones they made the mountains; the giant's teeth and the fragments of his shattered bones became rocks and boulders and stones; trees were made from his hair, and the clouds from his brains. Odin and his brothers raised Ymir's skull and made the sky from it and beneath its four corners they placed a dwarf. Finally, from Ymir's eyebrow they shaped Midgard, the realm of man. The maggots which swarmed in Ymir's flesh they gave wits and the shape of men, but they live under the hills and mountains. They are called dwarfs. so there ya go, bit of help from google there, i was feeling lazy and so its a cut and paste job..........but nicely written by a Mr. Micha F. Lindemans i really like this story becuase the frost giants were considered evil, but from their sacrifice come something so important and amazing. Ymir died and in doing so provided the universe with everything it needed to grow. :D

Did you snort the telfast....?

1. his decrepid overgrown scrotum is always filthied by mice 2. i snuck up a nun biting tree which donated some robust bread

i quite liked the "One half gram is the medically recognized threshold dose (minimum for a real trip)" bit that is 500mg unless im going nuts right? i wonder how much he considers to be a strong trip then!? 2 grams..3?!

sometimes in adelaide, we've been know to stay up as late as 1:00 AM.

hehehe, i just bought 2 of them and then checked the boards here and found this! mmmmmm more grafting is in order i believe

how do you harvest the pods without getting covered in the hairs? is there a method?

ooooh, very interesting theory. i cant say that i know for sure, however it does look similar to this: hxxp://www.desert-tropicals.com/Plants/Cactaceae/Cereus_huilunchu.jpg Cereus huilunchu similar spination, but different rib structure. im certainly interested to find out now ......hmmm need a cacti nerd smiley.

great another word that i can't pronounce correctly. damn you linguistics! damn you to hell!

bucket o' mud, now theres an idea. i may be able to get my hands on an old water tank, fill her with mud, magically materialise some rooted cuttings and BAM instant mangrove......erm grove. ooooh starting to sound like hard but feasable work. but FIRST we need someone to confirm the activity of this plant. 1 excited scientist + the media, may = story blown out of proportion. sorry to play the devils advocate so early but a first hand assay is needed.

aww shucks Darkstar! just doin my bit for the community. :D now all i need is to build a freshwater stream and to find some cuttings..... any one know how to create an artificial, working, ecologically sound river?

umm, this of any help? http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1138407.htm Barringtonia acutangula also known as - -freshwater mangrove -Indian Oak -Kandu almond

Fatty and Skinny! my brother always used to sing: Fatty and Skinny went to war, Fat got shot with an apple core. makes on sense but i love it. oh and i remembered another one! one bright day in the middle of the night two dead men got up to fight back to back they faced eath other drew their swords and shot each other

nice work Wandjina! I always wonder what happens to those songs/commericals/games that shape out young and pliable minds when they go out of fashion. we had a horrible pseudo patriotic one that went something like: waltzing matilda, who bloody killed her laying in the grass, with a dagger up her arse i think that there was more but i've supressed it for my own mental health. also the diarrhea song was popular: When you're sliding into first And your pants begin to burst That's diarrhea, diarrhea When you're sliding into two And your pants are filled with goo That's diarrhea, diarrhea When you're sliding into third And you feel a greasy turd That's diarrhea, diarrhea When you're sliding into home And your pants are filled with foam That's diarrhea, diarrhea thats all i'm brave enough to pull from the vault today.

"That sounds absolutely fascinating, is it the sort of document say a layperson could understand? " ummm...considering the average perosn needs to be told that apples have DNA in them......probly no...in fact im gonna go out on a limb here and say its fairly certain it's not for the average joe on the street

"The genome is like a recipe book, if you cut it up you get a lot of discrete units but that doesn't mean each unit makes sense without the rest of it" thats actually a good way of putting it. alternative splicing is only really starting to be understood as the ability to sequence whole large genomes has only recently occured. but it's really nifty that one sequence of exons can be used to create multiple proteins. there was a whole load of research done on alt splicing recently in a paper called "master and commander" worth checking out, but it lead to the discovery that some plants have the ability to express multiple resistance proteins agaisnt different pathogens from the same locus, simply by including/excluding a few exons. nifty.

i think we are getting a little caught up in specific issues here rather than looking at the big picture. YES GM can be abused YES humans are greedy and stupid BUT YES this tech has some greatly beneficial uses besides producing specky rice as was mentioned earlier the production of human insulin in a bacterial vector was a huge leap forward in medical and GE science. the potential exists for other highly theraputic compounds to be manufactued in bacteria, plants and animals. at what point do we say this is good GM and this is bad GM. surely we cant say that ALL GM science must be abolished. Any lab studing functional genomics, be it animal or human will be generating knockout and null mutant lines in order to study their particular protein. if GM was banned, than this research would not be possible. our understanding of medical science in relation to viral proliferation, genetic disease, cancer, and virtually all our research on proteomics would halt. the techniques we have developed are not olny commercially important, but also exceedingly usefull as analytical tools. i think that simply saying we are too irresponsible to use GM tech wisely is a little blind, there are other applications besides simply making a GM crop. who should decide what is far enough to push the envelope?