lysurgeon
Rising Star
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!
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!
