Reminds me I'll have to go and check the briar patches round here soon.
There are also some stands of japanese wineberries too, these are similar looking to rounded raspberries, but translucent pale orange, the color of a calippo ice pop, and very sweet, juicy with a refreshingly tangy acidity to them. If I can find enough I'd like to try making some wineberry and lime marmalade vodka from them.
Going to go out tomorrow or the next day to have a look, and as well, check the many stands of grasses to see if they have been infested with ergot fungus (C.purpurea, possibly seen some C.sulcata as well last year), because I could certainly use some fresh, very vital sclerotia, plus honeydew to check for conidia for my ergot R&D project. Been trying to mutate cultures of wildtype strains to induce strong alkaloid productivity. Its the damn stabilizing of the cultured production strains thats difficult, as the buggers like to turn scenescent with subculturing. Going to try encapsulation in polymerized calcium alginate microspheres this year, prepared with a perfluorocarbon emulsion to increase the permeability of the microencapsulated particles to oxygen in order to facilitate oxygen uptake. This year I think I'll also try incorporating a low level of arsenic, in order to poison phosphate metabolism after initial colonization, as alkaloid biosynthesis occurs after depletion of the intracellular pool of phosphate. Arsenic is toxic because of its similarity to phosphorus but in addition to arsenodiesters being too unstable to form an analogy of the phosphodiester bonded chains forming the backbone of DNA/RNA, the arsenical analogs just hydrolyze, and quickly too. But arsenic gets uptaken and then competes with processes that require phosphorus, whilst being unable to fulfil many of the metabolic functions of P.
So addition of arsenite or arsenate salts to the culture medium helps deplete the intracellular pool of phosphate after moving the grown culture from high phosphate growth medium to very low phosphate production stage medium and boost alkaloid biosynthesis in ergot cultures somewhat. And Believe you me, where ergot cultures are concerned, I'll take every last miligram It'll give me, even if it must be dragged out of it kicking and screaming and clawing at the walls of my culture vessels like a preteen boy desperately holding on for dear life to his front door jamb to avoid being sent off to sunday school with all of its catholic priest-ly horrors.
