I saw discussion of a person using sacred tree ash to basify plant matter in non-DMT related teks, and it made me wonder... Is tree ash basic enough to use in place of sodium carbonate? Has anyone ever tried? Does anyone know the approximate pH of tree ash? Could the pH vary depending on the type of tree?

I know tree ash is commonly used with hape.

If it's possible, I think it would be a neat thing to do as a "just for the nature vibes" tek.

Any thoughts or experiences? The Ents have helped me quite a bit, so I thought it might be neat to have some special spice to call them.

It would be able to replace sodium carbonate. Most of the water soluble portion of wood ash (as far as I'm aware, maybe there are exceptions) is potassium carbonate (potash), which will also work for raising the pH. You'll get some lime also but its solubility is relatively poor (amount of CaO depends on temperature etc., CaCO3 is a large component which has the CO2 driven off (calcinated) to form CaO, which turns to CaOH with addition of water (i.e. slaked)).

So ash would work fine by itself, but a lot of it would be insoluble. Ash water is a decent option, and if you wanted to measure the amount added, crystallizing the potash first would allow that.

I use potash for hape.

This is fascinating. I'm reading about potash and the pH can get as high as 12.

So theoretically, I could mix ash with water until I achieve the desired pH, and then use that in place of sodium carbonate to freebase? Would there be any risk of contaminating byproducts that would make this unsafe to smoke if I proceeded otherwise normally with my tek?

Mother nature is lit

I think it would be fine, using white ash would be ideal. A bit of char wouldn't be a big deal... wood-tar creosote isn't even particularly carcinogenic on its own (although it's relatively unstable and probably best to burn the wood to ash).

I wouldn't add solvents to dry ash though.