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Irpini

Using chemicals on Psychedelic Plants

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Hi all,

What are your views on using chemicals on psychedelic plants or plants intended for consumption?
When i say chemicals i mean like using Hydrogen Peroxide to promote healthy root growth and stop root rot or Rooting hormone for cuttings.

 

Cheers

Irpini

Edited by Irpini

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You'll have no problems with hydrogen peroxide in that application .... Shouldn't need it though, although it was pushed in hydroponics. 

 

A systemic insecticide/fungicide  however needs careful consideration.

 

Rooting hormone depends on the auxin used. But in general the concentration and amount is insignificant, and there is little chance of accumulation. 

 

Dont do lines of rooting powder:wink:

 

Another thing people forget is the growing media and fertilizer which can contain  levels of heavy metals that can accumulate. always pay to check the metals disclaimer on fert, lawn food is an example. 

 

Cheap arse potting mix is not made up to standards and can be made from materials unfit for food production. 

Edited by waterboy 2.0
Fungicide - we are all chemicals
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For some strange reason i feel guilty using pesticides on my ethnobotanicals... i never do!

I think i would to promote germination though. Maybe some ga3 (if thats what its called)

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3 hours ago, waterboy 2.0 said:

fertilizer which can contain  levels of heavy metals that can accumulate. always pay to check the metals disclaimer on fert

And if heavy metals are not enough, mined phosphate used in commercial fertilisers are often radioactive, and there is no disclaimer for that. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/36/115/36115603.pdf 

 

For me the biggest issue is what these ferts do to the soil. To save me doing heaps of writing I will cut and paste a little bit from Toby Hemenway's book 'Gaia's Garden' 

 

Until the soil life is properly fed, the plants can’t eat. Conventional farming gets

around this problem by flooding the soil with inorganic fertilizer, ten times what the plants can consume. But this, the engineer’s approach rather than the

biologist’s, creates water pollution and problem-prone plants. The soil life, and the soil itself, suffers from the imbalance.

Here’s what happens to soil life after overzealous application of chemical fertilizer. Mixing inorganic fertilizer with soil creates a surplus of mineral

nutrients (an excess is always needed, since so much washes away). Now the food in short supply is carbon. Once again, the soil life roars into a feeding

frenzy, spurred by the more-than-ample nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in typical NPK fertilizers. Since organisms need about twenty parts carbon

for every one of nitrogen, it isn’t long before any available carbon is pulled from the soil’s organic matter to match all that nitrogen and tied up in living bodies. These organisms exhale carbon dioxide, so a proportion of carbon is lost with each generation. First the easily digestible organic matter is

eaten, then, more slowly, the humus. Eventually nearly all the soil’s carbon is gone (chemically fed soils are notoriously poor in organic matter), and the soil

life, starved of this essential food, begins to die. Species of soil organisms that can’t survive the shortages go extinct locally. Some of these creatures

may play critical roles, perhaps secreting antibiotics to protect plants, or transferring an essential nutrient, or breaking down an otherwise inedible

compound. With important links missing, the soil life falls far out of balance. Natural predators begin to die off, so some of their prey organisms, no longer

kept in check in this torn food web, surge in numbers and become pests.

Sadly, many of the creatures that remain after this mineral overdose are those that have learned to survive on the one remaining source of carbon: your

plants. Burning carbon out of the soil with chemical fertilizers can actually select for disease organisms. All manner of chomping, sucking, mildewing,

blackening, spotting horrors descend on the vegetation. With the natural controls gone and disease ravishing every green thing, humans must step in with

sprays. But the now-destructive organisms have what they need to thrive—the food and shelter of garden plants—and they will breed whenever the now essential

human intervention diminishes. The gardener is locked on a chemical treadmill. It’s a losing battle, reflected in the fact that we use twenty times

the pesticides we did fifty years ago, yet crop losses to insects and disease have doubled, according to USDA statistics.

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I've sent various quarry materials to be tested for radionuclides, not phosphate resources though. Not uncommon across a range of rock formations. 

 

Think commercial tobacco in that context and see where your mind wanders..... 

 

Edited by waterboy 2.0
Spellcheck is slaying me
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22 hours ago, Irpini said:

When i say chemicals i mean like using Hydrogen Peroxide to promote healthy root growth and stop root rot or Rooting hormone for cuttings.

Don't know much about peroxide. Hormones can be fun to play with. They need to be used in moderation, some hormones compete against other hormones, so too much can start causing problems. Here's a quick break down of their different actions and interactions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142376/

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On ‎30‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 2:56 PM, Irpini said:

Hi all,

What are your views on using chemicals on psychedelic plants or plants intended for consumption?

When i say chemicals i mean like using Hydrogen Peroxide to promote healthy root growth and stop root rot or Rooting hormone for cuttings.

 

Cheers

Irpini

priority should be with the, grower and not the plants, because they are tough, and humans aren't.

make sure you hardly breath in, the "powdered rooting hormones"...or peroxide fumes.

 

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is it possible that these chemicals such as rooting hormones and other chemicals put into fertilisers and such could impact the chemical structure of the plants? I may not sound clear but for example in Salvia, could using chemicals on the soil alter the Salvinorin A molecules in the plant?

This may be a stupid question but i would rather be an idiot for an hour then for a lifetime.

Edited by Irpini
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H202 (hydrogen peroxide), is an oxidising agent, so it has the potential to change chemical structures, but its far more likely that H202 will oxidise the cell wall rather than the metabolites within the cell, when exposed to a plant.

 

Its highly unlikely that hormones could be causing chemical changes to plant metabolites.

 

Hormones are signalling molecules that interact with receptors triggering conformational changes to receptors, or binding to DNA, triggering changes to gene expression.

Enzymes perform biological chemical reactions, like for example there will be an enzymatic pathway which converts molecules step by step towards their final structure. So it may be possible for hormones to increase or decrease the rate at which enzymes are transcribed, which will affect the speed of metabolite accumulation. Often these pathways have bottlenecks, where one enzymatic reaction is performed at much lower rates then other parts of the pathway. Plant biologists study these enzymatic pathways looking for such bottlenecks, because if the enzymatic reaction is a 10 step process, but steps 3 & 4 are catalysed at slower rates then the rest of the pathway, its can be possible to use gmo technology to increase the rates of transcription for the enzyme that is slowing the pathway down, which will bring about overall yield increases of desired metabolites. For example; gmo poppies strains have been developed in this manner to specifically produce low accumulating alkaloids which are used to produce a lot of the semi synthetic opioids we see on the market today.

 

If you want to find out if a plant hormone has the potential to change to rates of transcription of a specific gene/enzyme, you would need to locate the enzymes promotor sequence and search it for hormone response elements. If you find it, there is the potential this gene/enzyme is regulated by whatever hormone response element you have located, but even then it would take a lot more work to prove this experimentally.

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