I have been reading, mostly on this site, about dealing with all the unique things going on with phalaris grasses. I am aware that time of day, time of year, amount of water in the environment, et cetera, can affect alkaloid profile, I am aware that foliage is preferable to whole plant. Ignoring all of this due to a limited time opportunity, I managed to collect a small sample (several clusters of the grass), and perform a quick extraction on it in order to determine whether or not this is a worthwhile plant to pursue.

All I did was chop the grass (roots were included), boil it for several hours (3 changes of water), boil down the resulting grass soup, basify with NaOH (in order to avoid extracting bufotenin and hordenine), extract with toluene (of which I evaporated a small sample), salt with HCl, then basify and extract into naphtha. The naphtha was, at the suggestion of a friend, placed in the freezer instead of evaporated.

The extract yielded from evaporating toluene was initially an oil, which smelled very gross but had elements of tryptamine aromas. Over night, it crystallized and smelled richly like acacia confusa extract. A friend suggested that the volatile compound that smells really bad might be the stuff that makes people have such strong negative physical reactions to drinking grass soup. The toluene extract reacted similarly to harmala alkaloids under blacklight (much less strongly though) indicating the possible presence of beta-carbolines. The naphtha did not react to blacklight. When the acidified alkaloid mixture was based to be extracted with naphtha, the smell was stronger and more similar to acacia confusa extract. The naphtha has been in the freezer for a couple days, and I only see a small little fleck of something floating around in there.

Based on these results, which I consider to be positive/desired results, I went out and harvested 2kg fresh plant material, consisting largely of young foliage, and absolutely no roots. It actually takes only around 2 hours or so to harvest 2kg from the wild. I chopped up the grass (with a pair of scissors), got it wet, and stuck it all in the freezer. I know this helps with other plants.

One thing I think is pretty interesting about this plant is that it is an invasive species which "bullies" other plants out of their own habitat, increasing the chances of extinction for native plants. So you're doing good for the world if you pull the grass out of the ground clump by clump (also, helps you to harvest more young foliage, as the young stuff doesn't have the obvious characteristic flowering heads that older plants have, but it does stick out of the same root ball), harvest the above-ground parts and destroy the roots. I thought about how maybe I should try sustainably harvesting the Aquatica, to preserve patches for future years, and then immediately realized that it's very common, all over the place near where I live, and isn't going away anytime soon. Thoughts on this matter?

I'm really just posting this thread to document my experiment with wild Aquatica.

The extraction I'm using is tailored to this plant. I'm using hydroxide base instead of carbonate base to prevent the extraction of bufotenin and hordenine (both are phenolic compounds, therefore attracted to lye solution, and both cause unpleasant physical symptoms in grass-extract-smokers, or so they say). I'm extracting with aromatics instead of aliphatics because aromatics more thoroughly dissolve DMT freebase. I'm salting out and basing back into naphtha to prevent extraction of beta-carbolines. I'm expecting that after all this is done, it will be worthwhile to perform aspirin or dry ice techniques to separate the mono- and non-methyl tryptamines from the dimethyltryptamines (of which at this point there should only be two - DMT and 5-MeO-DMT).

As for "don't try to isolate DMT from a plant that has other psychoactive alkaloids" theory, I would love to not do that, but unfortunately most of the alkaloids in phalaris grass are not safe with MAOI. Even 5-meo-dmt is not necessarily a good idea to take with MAOI. But that's how I get my medicine, so that's why I'm looking to do something like that. I want to be able to locally harvest a plant and yield an extract that is useable in ayahuasca context. Wish me luck, give me advices, but not the wrong advices!

Thanks for doing this work.

What season and time of day were the samples harvested?
I take it the material was prepared fresh?

and the biggies...
What did you get out of the naphtha?
How was the yield?
Does it smell of indole?

Aquatica seems very promising as an entheogen, I very much look forward to hearing more about your continued exploration.

bioassay?

The first extraction that I did was a very small sample size, and was done as a test to see if there are indolic smelling compounds present in the grass. There's really not enough for a bioassay. Since it's been 3 days in the freezer, the naphtha from the preliminary extraction is showing what I estimate to be around <5mg of white flaky material floating around. For all the world, it looks like what I want it to look like, but it's too very little.

The grass is nice and frozen, and I'm starting to boil now. Will update once I've pulled something.

Oh yeah, the grass in the preliminary extraction was harvested around 1pm, about 1 week ago. The 2kg of grass (actually 2,019g) was harvested around 5-7pm yesterday. Locally, it is mid-late summer.

To sum it up: the smell was indolic when I basified the acid-water that I had extracted amines into from the toluene, and that smell alone was enough to justify me spending a couple hours harvesting grass. It's relaxing really. I also can't say about the yields, since I didn't weigh the grass or the tiny tiny amount of precipitate. Since I have a convenient (and known) amount of grass this time around, I'll be able to determine yields. I will be bioassaying (cautiously, starting with <1mg) once I have enough to do so. I also think this plant is very promising, since it seems to have a clean alkaloid profile, from what I've read. Hopefully this is the local good medicine plant.

Thanks lysurgeon!

Keep up the good work, I'm excited to see what comes of it.

So far, the results are not spectacular, but it is a start.

Last night, I pulled with HCl from the toluene, cleaned it up, basified the solution with hot lye water and added naphtha. Shook for a few minutes, then put the naphtha in a jar, put in the freezer. This morning, the naphtha looks exactly the same, with nothing floating in it.

However, when I based the solution, it smelled strongly of acacia extract again (my acacia extract, after performing the CO2 and aspirin teks, wound up being mostly NMT with minority of DMT in there as well). I noticed more precipitate that wouldn't dissolve in naphtha, it looks semi crystalline but clearly oily. Kinda weird. It was unreactive to blacklight. I wound up putting everything back into the extraction, to prevent losses.

I will keep updating as things progress, especially IF they do.

Well, things did not progress as I wished. From 2kg chopped mature entire plants, I yielded about 50mg of a material which freeze-precipitated from naphtha, then melted at room temp, similarly to ACRB extracts. The material smelled curiously like a cross between DMT and tortilla chips, but in a most nauseating way. I am certain it is not exactly something I want to ingest at all. Based on what I've read here, it is possible that this is 5-meo-dmt or 5-meo-nmt.

I think the two potential problems are:
1) Grass that can be identified is too mature to contain appreciable levels of tryptamines - if 7-10 days is optimal, then I clearly overshot that mark by about 4 weeks at least.

2) there are several species of grass which appear nearly identical, including timothy grass. Perhaps I misidentified the grass and am looking at a random chemical that so happens to share enough physical properties with DMT as to end up in my freezer jar.

So realistically, I need to spend some time reading about how to properly identify phalaris aquatica. Maybe look through some more grass ID threads here on the nexus. And maybe it would be best to just buy some bulk seed, sprout it, then extract.

even when I grew out just random aquatica seeds, not from a high alkaloid selected strain, I got much higher yields then that.

Not sure if you're still on this post after this long and will see this or not, but I just wanted to know if there was any progression in figuring out how to get it to precip well? You said it smells of acacia..well, every time I've used a.confusa I've had to pre-evap a good bit before getting it to crash well after the first thick pull or two..maybe this just needs to be evaporated a bit to condense the crystals??

Or perhaps just further defatting??

i found out lately that extracting the compound isnt quite as easy as we would want it to be, i havent ever seen any successes with extracting from phalaris brachystachys, but i do mean to say that there must be something in it, it definintely has the smell, and its supposedly up to 1% and even 3%, im thinking build a growbox and feed it continously with hardcore nutrients, should give quite some growth, about aquatica i mean to say aquatica is the variety in which you want the lower part which is below water, or well for safety measures take just the lower section

This is misinformation.

The aerial foliage has the most alkaloids and it is known that Phragmites Australis is a rhizomal DMT-source which sometimes you may have to harvest roots from under water.
I don't know if any research went into this or it's a mix up with another plant....

If harvesting any species of Phalaris, the upper-most leaves will suffice, but if you feel like increasing your harvest weight, by all means harvest lower sections, though that might entail losing alkaloid weight.


Also, DimeTryp, multiple defats will have to be performed before adding base.
Xylene is nasty but room temp naphtha works decently.
Any time I've worked with grass it's taken at least 5 defats.
Good luck on your journey with the grass!