What was your soil mix for germination and growing out?

Heya, welcome to the forum! I'm not sure what the issue was regarding your activation email, but us mods are trying our best to work out the kinks of the forum as of late and hopefully this doesn't happen again.

At any rate, glad you're here 😊

I've been waiting YEARS for an activation email, and wow surprise it just came in today!

So I'm an enthusiastic plant grower. My latest efforts are propagating Calea and P.viridis, and making sure I have a replacement for my
short lived Passiflora edulis. At the moment, I'm processing too many passion flower fruits into frozen juice. The next will be turned into a lemon+passion flower curd. I wonder how long its shelf life is...?

I'm ready to share my knowledge and living material. Here we go!

Lots of great stuff you have growing on up there. I'd trade you for some seeds or small plants of many of your herbs. If interested pm me whenever. I've got a huge collection of random edibles. Lots of the perennial veggies and such.

🌞 Well Hello and welcome!
I am up the road a bit from you in CT.
I also grow veggies, berries, fruit, and trichocereus.

Perhaps we can trade some different varieties?
My growing & wish lists are out of date.
Is there anything in particular you're looking for?

Hey everyone! I’m located in NJ, USA and I grow a lot of medicinal and culinary herbs as well as vegetables and berries. My mother is an herbalist and we make a lot of teas, tinctures, salves, and balms. I also make soap!

Some of the plants going right now are elderberry, sumac, feverfew, holy basil, lemon balm, several mints, several sages, rosemary, thyme, oregano, ephedra, valerian, calendula, skullcap, Solomon’s seal, May apple, paw paw, and more. Some of the vegetables going right now are tomatoes, peppers, Asian greens, lettuce, potatoes, beets, cucumbers, beans, and sweet potatoes. Raspberries and blueberries too! I have some Trichocereus cacti and a prickly pear as well as a night blooming cereus.

Looking forward to see what y’all have got going on!

To retrofit the dual lid of the 75gal aquarium it cost me around $40. When I used aquariums previously I also elevated the plants off the bottom as shamichael mentioned. The one thing I had before was lots of free time. So I could manually mist the plants and/or walls of the aquarium and open the lid often for air exchange. Now I am not home for a ten hour window each day. In the past for when I wasn't home I had a vent on one side and a fogger on the other. It was set up on a timer which would handle air exchange as well as humidity. Maybe with my current schedule I should do something along those lines again. Hopefully next year at this time, if I meet all of my growing goals, I'll have a reason to put up my greenhouse. Thanks for the input so far guys! Hoping to hear what other people do too.

So I'm thinking part of what's hard to assess about this is does anyone know what exactly are the active compounds in silene capensis? Some places say saponins and if that's the case silene latifolia is also known to be high in saponins so may also be of use? I saw that native Americans used it but didn't specify if they used the root or if they used it for dreaming. Without knowledge of what exactly you're hoping to find in there in the first place the whole thing is a little sketchy.

As far as cross breeding I'd imagine you'd want to manually pollinate then cover the flower to avoid being pollinated from other plants. Don't know if it'd work but couldn't hurt to try.

I did find some references to indigenous peoples of the Great lakes region using latifolia for insomnia and as a sedative. So there is some mention of its usage? Obviously it doesn't make it true because I read it online though. Also there doesn't appear to be any alkaloids present sunshine. It is supposedly the saponins that create the visionary and prophetic dreams.  The main issue I see with this experiment is how would we know if the cross is truly a cross? Maybe the plant we attempted to pollinate had pollinated itself? The plants look so similar that i don't think we could distinguish the results without some sort of genetic proof that we don't have access to. That's much of the reason I have never made this attempt. And I agree completely shamichael! It really sucks that indigenous peoples knowledge wasn't somehow preserved better. For all we know there are many actives nearby that never made it into the literature.

I'd wager that the local cold-tolerant species is non-active, just for the simple fact that there's no record of their usage in that way. Plants often use alkaloids as defense mechanisms. It's possible that they have the same alkaloids, different less-active ones, or none at all. Its possible they had actives once upon a time but lost them due to lack of needing them in cold environments. It's really anyone's guess. I'd bet they CAN be crossed since their growth style is so similar. They just seem compatible. Interspecific breeding is relatively common, and inter-genus crossing isn't uncommon.

Only one way to find out! I may give it a shot myself once my capensis seeds get here. I'll be sending some to you as well as per our previous discussions. I'm excited to see what we find.