More on my grass garden - The snow is melted after the coldest winter here in more than 2 decades. Lows on many days were about 0F. During much but not all of the cold there was a blanket of protective snow. It looks like I now need to learn how to harvest and process.

Short Spike (French) from seed - Good DMT about half of which was n-oxide and lots of gramine. Removed because of gramine.

Short Spike (other) from seed - Good DMT about a third of which was n-oxide and much less gramine than the other short spike. Wintered badly. It many not survive.

Yugo Red from clone Good DMT with gramine about the same as other short spike. Removed because of gramine and the difficulty in keeping a clone from reseeding.

Big Medicine from clone – No DMT but a very very good source of gramine. The clone supplier may have let this plant reseed itself. It is no longer Meg Medicine. Someone with no GC could easily end up using an extract from this plant. I emailed the supplier.

Turkey Red - DOA.

AQ1 – DMT and little else!!! And it is still alive after winter. It was damaged a bit, but in several weeks I will be able to do test harvests and processing.

Where do I find the best method for harvest and processing?

I thought Brachystachys is not perennial???


Shouldn't Yugo Red actually contain mainly 5-MeO-DMT?



That is very interesting, indeed. For as it seems others had no luck during winter and they quickly died in winter when temp was freezing. Were they anywhere close to a house or anything heated, so that probably the ground got some heat from nearby?


IMHO the best guide seems to me to be this one:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=28869

Although I couldn't test it yet. Hopefully this year this will change...


BTW:
As a small update. Earlier in this thread someone described a method to propagate phalaris by stem cuttings. Tried it with many, but none survived, they all just died off. They all did not show even the slightest bit of new root growing.

So either I'm doing something really wrong or this tek is very difficult or it only works on Brachys.

Yes, the Yugo Red which had a good level of DMT also had a bit of 5meo (which I liked). However the AQ1 was very clean and I expect that I would occasionally let the Yugo Red drop seeds. The Big Medicine clone that I purchased showed how disastrous that can be. Nothing but gramine.

A short update:

My ordering of the different Picta strains didn't work out. It seems it shouldn't have been this year...

So I'm still growing my alleged (not yet verified) "Big Medicine" and "Turkey Red" together with an unknown Picta strain.
They are now all fixed planted in the garden.
Only my AQ1 is still growing in a pot.

My observations so far:
They spread really really slow. If you would wanna wait to get enough just by root spreading you will probably wait 10+ years...

Unfortunately I removed all flowers that came immediately (to prevent any seeding), as now I would wanna try to get seeds at least from my "Turkey Red". But it seems the flowering stage is now basically over.
(I had the hope that maybe I could just put a plastic bag over each flower to prevent it being infused by foreign pollen. But I have no idea if this would have worked anyways. Would a flower be capable to pollinate itself like that?)

As said above my many trials to clone by cuttings as described for Brachystachys didn't work at all. But I still didn't give up the idea completely.
So I now ordered special growth media for in vitro cutting propagation and have a try like that.
If this also doesn't work, I give up.
If anyone has any knowledge about in vitro propagation of grasses, please come forward!

Take your arundinacea clone and pull it out of the soil, you'll see it's a big interconnected rootmass thing consisting of several individual rhizomes.

Simply rip these rhizomes apart and replant each one it it's own smallish pot, they will fill out the pots in a few weeks at which point you can put them in bigger pots and repeat the processs once they've filled those out.

Did you try that yourself?
That's basically what Appleseed suggested, although from his description I'm pretty sure he never tried it himself like that.

My problems with this method:
It is a really tedious process to get the rhizomes free and you kill a lot (most) of roots during that process, which is probably the reason why many of the new split rhizomes died off.
I had a pretty bad success rate with this method.
The method as described here on the nexus with just splitting the plants in bigger chunks works OTOH. But it then is just still a very slow way of propagation IMHO.

As said before, my plants simply don't multiply their rhizomes very fast (actually very slowly...except AQ1). I also don't know why. Maybe it's the climate or the soil. No idea.

If OTOH this cloning by cutting nodes would work with a high success rate, then that would be an easy and fast way.
So I will try it now this way.
Let's collect some experience in all the different ways

One thing is sure:
As now I really know how Arundinacea looks like, I got aware that it is really everywhere.
So one would have to be very cautious when trying to breed true by seeds for "Turkey Red".

Aum_Shanti, the stem cutting method, we only tried with p. brachystachys. It works well prior to inflorescences emerging. After that, success rate was going down rapidly. Not sure if this is related to summer heat as it requires high humidity and water or the plants shifting to seed production.

The cutting adopted the same developmental stage of the parent plant.

It's a good method to fill up your pots with brachy plants if you only purchased a few seeds.

Works best with the lowest/lower stalk nodes, and best if you already see tiny bumps emerging from that area (near those lower nodes). In theory it should work with p. aquatica as well, since they are very similar.

Have you heard about willow water? We haven't used it with phalaris, but it may be of help.
Also, the best season for cloning grasses is spring (we think)?

Thank you very much for this info.
I read somewhere using a Hyacinth solution for that. But they are nowhere available here. But willows are no problem here.
So thanks a lot for this advice.

As said I try to do it on Arundinaceas, with the goal to have at the end a few square meters of grass in my garden.

What are your exact details of how you handle the cuttings?

I could find something about another grass (Vetiver). There they cut 2cm below the node and 3cm above the node (so 5cm pieces). Then they stick them 10mm into the soil. So basically the node is 10mm above the soil.
Did you do it also like that? I'm really curious of what is the best position of the node.

Do you think using willow water on the plants could stimulate a faster propagation by rhyzomes?

Did you ever try to keep a Brachystachys over several years, by always cutting the flowers?

I'm thinking of using a semi-hydro method with clay balls to make this process easier, although this idea is rather in its infancy.


Does that include distinguishing it from its very close lookalike, Cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata)? That one had me completely fooled a couple of times!

I would tend to think so, although I certainly cannot be fully sure (I didn't ask the plants ).

But already the places make the biggest difference. E.g. you seldomly see Arundinacea not at some water.
But at creeks it is often very dominant. Sometimes even growing in the creek.
Whereas Cocksfoot is IMHO rather a plant you encounter on simple grass plains or at the forest border.

But generally I would say Glomerata has way narrower blades and it lacks hairs at the glumes.
Also to me Arundinacea usually looks way sturdier.



Interesting. Give it a try and report.
But they make really a lot of roots. So I would think these roots intervine even in a hydroculture. But they surely would be easier to separate than from soil potted plants. So probably not that much root damage.

Yep, I've taken a lot of clones using this methodology over the years. These grasses are incredibly hardy and tend to regrow pretty vigorously after rhizomal division.

I happen to have a bunch of Turkey Red right here that I divided up about a month ago from a single pot ready to be moved to bigger pots and continue the process of exponential biomass production.

Lol, OK good to know, so then It is me, my methods, or my climate...
Do you split them really up into single Rhizomes, or do you split them in little bunches?

Did you already do an analysis of your Turkey Red?
We are still lacking it's alkaloid profile.

Edit:
I thought about it. Maybe it didn't work, because I did it during the winter indoors?

Little bunches, though I have done it successfully with individual rhizomes and even done it in the winter indoors using just the light of an east facing window (they do a lot better under the LED and south window though).

I did TLC on a Turkey Red extract at one point and got a tentative positive for 5-MeO-DMT. I placed a nice white mhrb extracted N,N standard and a synthetic 5-MeO standard on a plate and put the TR extract in between them. The spot matched perfectly to the 5-MeO standard, but the Ehrlich's follow up did not react (could have been a concentration issue).

We still need to get a Turkey Red extract to Energy Control and get a real spectra on it.

OK thank you very much for that info.
So the bad info is: The problem is me...
The good info is: The problem is me...at least that's the point I can easiest work on

Very interesting about the TLC. Looks promising...

Nope, they die after seeding, the plant spents itself on seed production and dries up. But the seeds are also very nutricious for animal, bird and human. The seed milk is also sold commercially as a supplement called leche alpiste (canary seed milk).

There is some sort of dormancy in the seeds - just place the seeds in the fridge to simulate a cold season. Then you can grow them year around.

So I've stuck my 'Raspberries and Cream' into the clay ball substrate. The roots in the pot were indeed too tightly bound to be worth separating. Also into the tub went my feral specimen which has some notable differences from the purchased ones and allowed me to observe that, in the case of this particular feral 'Raspberries and Cream' specimen, tall stems become recumbent and start sending out a new shoot from each node. I'm fairly confident these will root so it's worth considering this as an additional method of propagation. Layering, basically.

In addition to the clay balls I've put some crushed limestone, fine basalt grit and volcanic rock dust into the tub. I'll be adding a circulation pump soon to stop it getting too stinky although the grass itself is fairly tolerant of this kind of situation (not as much as P. australis, though.)

I'll be layering the recumbent stems of the feral variety into the tub as they lean over, or further tubs if they lean outwards. But really I ought to check for alkaloids in the vinegar extract I made in the spring!

EDIT: I think they're called 'Strawberries and Cream' really, but the red colour is so much nearer raspberries to my eye! Aka 'Feesey', as far as I can gather.

Nice!

Very cool to see someone going the hydro route with it.

I'll be following this project.

interesting stuff, downwardsfromzero. We first noticed these shoots from the nodes when we was away for some weeks and One(1) of the pots was knocked over. The knocked over pot had roots emerging from the nodes...

I think I should try layering the stems of the purchased plants, otherwise they run to flowering. According to popular consensus these flowers are sterile, but we'll see, huh? The feral plants are not flowering yet...

I photographed the differences between the feral and purchased stem nodes/ligules.

1) Feral. Nodes are more purplish (looks brown in the photo).
2) Purchased. Nodes only green.
3) Feral. Ligules most often very close to nodes.
4) Purchased. Nice view of node & ligule together.
5) Purchased. Often nodes have extended some way beyond the ligules.


Looking at these subtle differences, perhaps these are two different varieties and the supposed synonymy is the result of (understandable) confusion.

I think the feral specimen deserves its own tub but nwo sti sevresed nemiceps laref, um, I mean, I've run out of clay balls at the moment.

I think the problem is, that we have no idea what strain your wild harvested one is.
Maybe it's even something new???

As said before, there are some other tricolor strains, not being Feesey.
And I would think it is possibly really difficult to differentiate these different tricolor strains, if you haven't them side by side.

But I'm still wondering how one can breed new Picta strains if they are infertile.
Does one just cross a conventional Arundinacea with a Picta pollen and hope to get a new Picta?
Then your plant could be a completely unique strain.