I have come back to my wild lettuce plants to see how my lactucarium is coming along.

The sap has dried into brown scabs on the stalk of the plant. There seems to be fewer areas of dried sap than the cuts I initially made.

It is these brown crusty bits that I will harvest and later process into a tincture.

I missed the fist few pieces. Thy are quite small and adhere tightly to the plant. Once I actually got a nail under the edge of the chunk of dried sap it was like releasing a spring and the chunk flew off into the wild yonder. The stem did not start to seep sap again after it as removed. In most cases the stalk was completely smooth and I was unable to even tell it had been cut. Not what I expected.

This is what I’m aiming to collect. I would like several grams of it but am unsure of how much a plant may produce. This way of scoring the stem only seems to produce a little. It would take many plants or much patience to do it this way. So……

I have decided to cut the top off one plant. I will collect this sap and cut off another piece a few millimetres below the last cut. I will eventually cut the plant all the way down to the ground by a centimetre or so every few days.