In the photos you can see the needle like crystals, sort of.
I used the method I write of in this post here:
Edited to add this short write up of the delosperma thing:
Old growth of 2+ years of material purchased as D cooperi and similar yet slightly different material grown from seed of plants found growing in a yard were clipped. This was covered with water with some vinegar in it and microwaved to keep it boiling for about ten minutes. Actually I used a serial processing method I have shared here before, I harvested a volume of material weighing over a kg I didn't actually weigh it. The volume itself was about two quarts worth of compressed material. I processed about 1/3 of the material at a time by covering it with the diluted vinegar, boiling it for about ten minutes then pouring the resulting 'tea' onto the next batch, adding a bit of water to replace that lost and then boiling for another ten minutes. This method uses the same water to extract into instead of combining three equal volumes of water and reducing them and this method is the only method I have had work with phalaris arundinacea to obtain crystalline alkaloid extracts of any decent amount.
I then filtered out coarse material with a sieve and reduced the tea in volume, again using a microwave, when it was still very wet but of a much smaller volume I added some calcium hydroxide, lime, to it and then used a double boiler method to dry it to a paste, not a totally dry material in this case. I then covered it with 91% iso, not 70%, this meant I had to wait longer for the alcohol to be effective, since it was a paste i stirred it a lot as well, the alcohol became yellowish and I poured it off and evaporated it, I did not freeze it in this case.
Several days later what you see in the photographs is the result.
When the alcohol began to dry it did have an odor like dmt, but smells much sweeter now, not like dmt...?
Harvest was almost a week ago, so January, temps were just below freezing at night.
Honestly I have worked with most of this same plant material for about four years now and have never had much luck, though seeds are active in an interesting way when smoked, but I already posted about that. I have not obtained any crystals, but had been using conventional methods of extraction, like AB, STB, xylene evap, naphtha freeze etc. all I ever got was an oil without much activity. This is the first time I used the method I linked to on this material, but the material looked different, it had lots of pigments of purple in the leaves and stems, the stems I focused on were much older than previous material I had looked at and this is the first time I did a winter harvest when it was cold, sadly this means there are too many variables to be able to understand why the material is now yielding what appears to be a crystalline alkaloid.
