Does the diameter of a cactus indicate when it's ready to be harvested and prepped for consumption?

Simple quick question. Also does age have any bearing on when it's ready for consumption or growth only ?

Bump

I'd Personally recommend not harvesting a cactus unless the cutting is about 2-3inchesin diameter, 3inches ideally.

My pot-grown cacti would take forever to get that big, so I lavished them with love and then cut them when they were too tall for the windowsill. Leaving the cuttings for a year or two in a dimly-lit place (no soil) may or may not have had some effect on the final potency of the brew (well, it definitely worked!) but I could not compare with un-aged cuttings. Thinking about it, most of them were about 2 inches diameter but none was anywhere near 3 inches.

And then of course there's the factor of San Pedro referring to any of a number of Echinopsis (Trichocereus) species, and the overall providence thereof...

Most will tell you that the older cacti will have more mescaline...

Some will also tell you that, similar to when humans are stressed they produce cortisol as a response, that mescaline is produced in cacti as a means of stress response, so older cacti, that have been through a good deal of stress and recovered will contain more mescaline.

...Though I'm not sure how true any of this is, and am somewhat curious myself.

As far as I know there isn't an exact time to harvest trichocereus cacti, if your able, and have large selection I'm sure there are preferred stalks, but these cacti can potentially be active during almost any stage of its life...

-eg

My understanding is that an older specimen will be much more potent than a younger one.

That might explain why alkaloid %'s in the literature fluctuate so wildly, since people who are analyzing wild collected cactus in the Andes get nice yield, while folks in Europe analyzing young seed grown plants get low yields.

I say let em get a few feet tall, the girth thing is tricky since the various species vary wildly in their girth, bridgesii tending to be narrow while peruvianus and pachanoi seem to be fatter, if you got a terschekii or validus or something they can get 12-14 inches in diameter (!)