I would like to repeat these tests but anyways what I did was pulverize the phalaris, do a paste with sodium carbonate and a bit of water, pull with limonene, salt limonene with vinegar, evap vinegar on low heat, make paste with sodium carbonate and letting it further dry on very low heat (under 50c), and then pulling on that with alcohol.

I wasnt looking for a good yield, so I only did one limo pull, one vinegar salting and one alcohol pull on the freebased acetate. Anyways, I think what is really separating gramine is the limonene which isnt pulling the other alkaloids, so I think basically any tek using limonene (like BLAB for example, or q21 or amorfati) will work. I think actually any naphtha tek would work fine too, but this needs to be further tested. I just wouldnt trust xylene or things like DCM or chloroform.

But yeah Ill post back when more tests are done to confirm this.

So what do we know about at home propegation of this grass? As an annual I am assume it will not put out runners and so you canot just clone it? I am guessing you must get it to go to seed in order to grow the grass long term? I am going to get some seed and grow it but I want something for longer than just 1 year..yet noone seems to talk about this.

Will it go to seed indoors or should it be grown outdoors for the summer so that it can set seed? I guess it would need to be left alone in order to seed as well?..so it would be good to leave one patch that you dont clip at all and just let it go..

Can you just veg the plant for as long as you like, as people do with cannabis and then just simulate light cycles for seed?..what if the grass is grown indoors all year in warm temps and is left in veg state without going to seed? Will it still die back after a year?

These are things I really want to know when it comes to growing this plant that I just cant find anywhere. All I can find is it is an "annual".

Some basic Brachystasis cultivation notes of mine:

I grow my Phalaris outside. Soil planted for seed production and in buckets for foliage harvesting. I just use regular bagged compost with a bit of garden dirt filled half way. Pots have drainage holes. Surface sow with a sprinkle of soil on top and saturated, cover with a clear grocery bag. Generally start to pop up in a week to ten days. Keep well watered. I have noticed that both Brachystasis and Arundinicea will go through a 'fragile' phase where it looks like the seedling are about to keel over and fail. If nothing happens to them- cats, heavy rain, kids footballs- this passes after a couple of weeks and they soon start to become more robust. The trick with foliage harvest is to catch them just on the cusp of flower head production; as they come into flower they rapidly become weedy and you will find yourself with a lot of not very useful stem and not much blade material.
Once they hit the top of the pot I feed them weekly with a general high N lawn feed mixed as strong as they can take.
I haven't grown indoors so can't help with that.
Once cut you can usually get another crop from a pot before it quickly goes to seed. Although an annual, Brachystasis will over-winter in the SE UK unless covered in snow for days on end. Over-wintered plants produce a lot more seed than those flowered in the year of sowing.

good info, fourthripley, cheers

P. aurndinecea and P. aquatica are both perennial. The other Phalaris species are annual. Aquatica and arundinecea will also cross breed to form a cross called 'Ronphagrass'. Both these species will thrive in or near an aquatic environment. P. arundinecea will often form dense mats of islands of grass in the middle of creeks. Both species spread by rhizome and individual clones are therefor easy to cultivate. I would imagine that Ronphagrass would be the same and I suspect that 'Big Medicine' is just such a plant.

My idea for cultivating either of these is to take a small kids' pool, the stiff plastic kind and drill large (1" - 1.5" ) holes in the bottom for drainage. Dig a hole in the yard to fit the pool then fill the pool with a mixture of sand, vermiculite, and gardening compost; sand making up the majority of the mix. Top off with topsoil or compost as a thin top layer. This will approximate the soil that I've seen the grass thriving near and in creeks. It will also make the soil very loose so the rhizomes can spread easily. Plant the pool with your clones and keep moist while growing out. Once the plants are 18"-24" tall, clip back to 10"-12" every couple of weeks till July or so in the Northern Hemisphere. In July, let the plants grow out, either provide shade OR nitrogen fertilizer if not done so at this point. Either will increase alkaloid production and doing both is about the same as one or the other. Once plants start to get large and are starting to form seed heads, reduce watering to a minimum. This stress will further increase the alkaloid level. After a week or two of this stressing, harvest the plants by cutting back down to 10" or so. This should be your main harvest.Return watering to normal levels and continue to harvest the grass every 2 weeks or there about to keep the clipping stress up. You should be able to do this till frost stops the growth of the plant. The plants should over-winter fine and continue to multiply and thicken the patch year after year with a little bit of proper care.

well now that i have reread this whole thread..i think im going to get super serious with this stuff this year..

ill let you guys know if my phalaris brachystachy i planted survived the winter..this is exciting

I have some brachys germinating now as well..should be interesting.

..a good sub-project for researcher nexians would be to find the strain of Phalaris arundinacea used by Jim DeKorne in the 90s, which was one of the (rarer?) 5meoDMT varieties..

from Entheogen Review Spring 1995 p103:

from "TRYPTAMINE CONCENTRATIONS IN PHALARIS VARIETIES" Entheogen Review: Summer 1994

and then there's a Phalaris brachystachys from Greece in
"PHALARIS BRACHYSTACHYS" Entheogen Review Spring 1996


..variety "Turkey Red" used to be available from vendors, who sometimes specified it as a 5meo type..i haven't checked the supplier scene in a while..
.

..i am posting some images to aid in the identification of Phalaris arundinacea..it also has 'varigated' varieties, meaning with pale striped leaves..very common across the US and europe..
the inflorescenses (flower clusters) are like most Phalaris, but spread/thin out more when seed is fully developed [see bottom pic]

what about the photo from wikipedia, is this also arundinacea ? it looks like this could be the turkey red judging by the color

what confuses me, is that i have seen this plant that is shown in wikipedia and it is not exactly the same as the one that is posted here with elongated flower buds.

the one with elongated flower buds grows only near watery parts (rivers, swamps etc ), the one with spread out flower buds does not care where it grows, it even comes out of sidewalks. and also there are few more differences i have seen.this at least the case in my area.

..as i understand it Ambivalent, while there is some variation, in arundinacea the flowers are more elongaed as they initially develop, but spread out more (like the wikipedia photo) as the seed develop.. when fully mature it looks like the wikipedia (lower) photo, but there is variance in how densely clumped or spread the flower head is..
the flower head is denser than other (non Phalaris) species of grass which look similar..

i've been unable to locate any image of the 'Turkey Red' variety..that's looking like a good bet.. seed should be about..
.

maybe this is the case...but my observations were quite different. i have never seen the ones with elongated flower buds so spread out, even at the end of summer when they are quite dry. also they grow on different places here(the one with elongated flower buds chooses more wet places).

i will document what i say with photos and post it in a few days. phalaris is going crazy this part of the year here.

..interesting..from a little more research, the differences in genetic variants of the species is partly related to the degree of 'spread' in the inflorescences..one description says "This plant is morphologically variable and at least 10 intraspecific categories have been described."..


as an example, below is Phalaris arundinacea var. picta L...it is displaying aspects of both narrow and wide spread, due to maturity..other varieties may lean one way or the other in appearance the whole time..the exact definition of the 'species' gets very taxonomically fine..

very interesting indeed...this explains much from what i have observed.

I have a sample of Turkey Red grass ready to be sent off for analysis. I'll try to get that sent out ASAP and hopefully it will help us crack the phalaris 5-meo code

^I have been thinking a lot about growing some turkey red lately..I really want to grow a 5meoDMT plant..

Ok. So I gathered a bunch of the phalaris arundinacea. Just identified it to the black and white pic ^^ but it has not flowered, so I can only see the ligule part sticking out.
I was thinking about drying it now, but don't know if I should be clipping the leaves off from the stems. If I should clip only the tops of the leaves. Any help would be great!

..cool everyone!
dreamer042 wrote: ..this is great..!

i am searching for a quote/reference, but when Giogio Samorini announced the AQ1 strain, it was said to be 1.0% DMT (dry weight), at the time considered the highest known plant source, until MHRB use/research kicked in a few years later..the easy availability of Mimosa, along with persistent fear of gramine in phalaris, is what seems to have lead to AQ1 being mostly ignored..till now!
.

Just getting into grasses. Time to put my skills to the test. I live in the eastern U.S. This stuff is all over my state. And coincidently there just opened up a park less than a mile from my house that IM SURE has this arundinacea all over. I'm more than positive i've seen it all over that area. The area is a mass of wetlands & alot of lowland area.


I'll take a stroll over there in a few days and report back.

Long time ago Phalaris was the first plant tried to make an extract from, like the grass I was a bit green in those days and thought it would be easy, not, turns out phalaris is full of chlorophyll that needs gallons of solvent and multiple washes to get rid of. IMO a complete waste of time, compared with root bark it sucks, i would only use it if and when everything else is illegal and/or unobtainable, and if prohibitions continue to infringe that may well come to pass.