This is an execution manual — the master holds the "why"
This document is the procedure for a world with no stores, reagents, or reliable power. You'll make your own disinfectants, nutrients, hormones, and gel. Success is lower and more variable than the modern path — but the biology is identical, and people cultured plants this way before any modern product existed. For the science behind each step — contamination biology, the hormone ratio, media formulas, diagnostics, and the full FAQ — see the master reference.
Links work when all three files sit in the same folder.
No stores, no reagents, no reliable power. You'll make your own disinfectants, nutrients, hormones, and gel, and sterilize with fire instead of an autoclave. Success is lower and more variable than the modern track — but the biology is identical, and people cultured plants this way before any of the modern products existed. Patience, cleanliness, and a notebook carry you. Start with the easiest herbaceous plant you can find.
Two things you cannot improvise your way around: real heat sterilization and still, clean air. Everything else has a foraged substitute. If you protect a pressure canner and learn to distill alcohol, you keep most of the modern success rate. Without them, lean on tyndallization and patience.
Salvage and make your kit
- Sterilizer: guard any pressure canner like gold (it runs on fire, not grid). No canner? You'll tyndallize (below).
- Clean-air box: any clear-lidded container or a clear-plastic-draped frame — your still-air box. Free and effective.
- Vessels: any clear heat-proof glass jars/bottles with lids; cap with foil or cloth-over-pinhole for gas exchange while barring bugs.
- Blades & grips: razor blades, sharpened steel, honed knife tips; salvaged tweezers or fire-hardened bamboo picks.
- Flame: an oil/fat lamp, candle, or ember bed to sterilize tools.
- Water: rainwater, or distilled by condensing boiling steam on a cool surface.
Make your disinfectants
- Alcohol (most valuable): ferment any sugar source (fruit/honey/grain) to a mash, then distill in a sealed pot with a cooled condenser coil. Concentrate, then dilute back to ~70% for surfaces, hands, tools, and a brief explant dip. It's also your hormone solvent and lamp fuel — relearn this first.
- Bleach equivalent: stockpiled calcium hypochlorite ("pool shock") stores for years dry — dissolve, let settle, use the clear liquid at roughly bleach strength. Or generate hypochlorite by electrolysing salt water. Wood-ash lye and strong vinegar are weak partial fallbacks only.
- Free sterilants: boiling water and steam for jars/tools; sunlight (UV) on surfaces.
Sterilize by fire — tyndallization
No pressure vessel? Three-day fractional sterilization
- Steam or boil the media/water 30–45 min.
- Leave it warm 12–24 h — surviving spores germinate into vulnerable cells.
- Boil again. Rest again. Boil a third day. Three cycles clear most spores.
Tools: heat metal to glowing in a flame, cool in the still-air box, then cut. Boiling alone (100 °C) is not sterilization — that's why the repeat cycles matter.
Improvise the nutrient medium
You're imitating MS: nitrogen and potassium dominate, calcium and magnesium next, phosphorus a bit less, plus traces. All organic inputs must be steeped, strained crystal-clear, and hard-sterilized.
A usable crude medium — per ~liter
- Sugar (non-negotiable): ~30 g honey or cane sugar dissolved in rain/distilled water.
- Minerals: a small splash of well-aged, strained compost tea; a pinch of wood-ash leachate (K, go light — alkaline); dissolved eggshell (Ca); a little Epsom salt if salvaged (Mg/S); a rusty-iron-in-vinegar drop (Fe).
- Vitamins + natural hormones in one: ~5–15% coconut water if available (carries cytokinins, vitamins, sugars), or a trace of sprouted-grain/yeast extract.
- Target mildly acidic pH ~5.5–6 — read it with red-cabbage-juice indicator; nudge with a drop of vinegar (down) or pinch of ash (up).
- Gel it (next step), then tyndallize.
Crude nutrition is forgiving once tissue is established; run comparison batches and keep notes — concentrations vary wildly.
Make a gel — or skip it
Foraged agar from red seaweed (coastal)
- Gather red seaweed (Gracilaria, Gelidium, etc.); wash well.
- Boil in water ~1 hour to leach the gel; strain hot through fine cloth.
- Let it set, then freeze it solid overnight and thaw — the freeze-thaw squeezes water out and concentrates the crude agar into a firmer mass. Wash and re-set. Dry sheets for storage.
No seaweed? Boil bones/hides for gelatin (softer, melts warm, some microbes eat it — keep cultures cooler and cleaner), or use isinglass (fish bladder). Simplest of all: skip gel — use a liquid medium with a raft: rest the explant on a sterilized wad of cloth, paper, or clean moss floating on the liquid so it feeds but breathes. In collapse conditions the raft is often more reliable than weak homemade gel.
Brew your hormones
- Rooting (auxin) — willow water: steep chopped young willow (or poplar/cottonwood) twigs in warm water 24–48 h; strain. Use as the water base for rooting medium, an explant soak, and a free rooting dip. Tyndallize before it goes in a jar.
- Shoots (cytokinin): coconut water (best), other immature-seed liquids, sprout extracts, dilute seaweed/kelp.
- Ratio rule (identical to the modern world): more cytokinin → shoots; more auxin → roots; balanced → callus. Adjust by shifting how much willow water vs. coconut water you add.
Clean the mother plant & take the explant
Weeks ahead: shelter the source plant from rain, keep foliage dry, prune for fresh growth, remove damaged leaves. Harvest young shoot tips / nodes — the easiest, cleanest tissue. Then sterilize the explant:
Improvised surface sterilization
- Wash in boiled, cooled water.
- ~70% distillate dip, 30–60 s (skip only if you have no alcohol).
- Calcium-hypochlorite / bleach-equivalent soak, 10–20 min, agitating. Salvaged dilute hydrogen peroxide is a gentler fallback.
- Rinse 3–4× in sterile (tyndallized) water inside the still-air box.
- Trim off damaged edges with a flame-sterilized blade on flame-passed foil; place on medium.
For browning (woody tissue): dip in citrus/rosehip (vitamin C) water, add a pinch of fire charcoal to the medium, work fast, transfer to fresh medium in a day or two.
Initiate, and read the jar
Seal, label, keep at room warmth in bright indirect light (north window or salvaged light on a rigid daily schedule). Watch daily. Contamination (cloud/slime/fuzz/sour smell) → remove and boil-kill immediately, away from clean jars. Expect higher losses than the modern track — start many jars, cull fast, note what preceded each failure.
Multiply
Move clean growth to cytokinin-leaning (coconut-water) medium. Every few weeks, in the still-air box, divide the shoot cluster with a flamed blade and re-plate each piece. Expect slower, less uniform multiplication from crude hormones — cull off-types and re-initiate from the wild mother plant often to keep the line true.
Root — the easy stage here
Rooting is Branch B's friend because natural auxin is easy. Either root on willow-water medium, or skip in-jar rooting entirely and root the shoots like ordinary cuttings: dip bases in strong willow water (or a honey smear), stick into a sterile airy humid medium under a cover. This ex vitro route sidesteps a sterile step and often works better.
Wean to soil
Hardening off — go slow or lose them
- Wash all gel/residue off the roots in clean lukewarm water.
- Pot into a sterile, airy mix (screened sand/compost/charcoal/leaf mold).
- Cover at high humidity (jar, bag, or tote).
- Vent a little more every few days over 2–4 weeks.
- Shade, no strong feeding at first; then grow on → harden outdoors → plant out.
Bank the genetics
No liquid nitrogen, so store in layers: slow-growth cultures in a cool cellar (subculture every 6–12 months), alginate synthetic seed (drip tissue in seaweed-alginate into a calcium bath — coastal-foragable), and above all dry saved seed (cool, dark, airtight) as the deep archive. Use culture to multiply and clean genetics; use dry seed to store them. Never keep a rare line as a single jar.
Guard the canner (or tyndallize) → distill alcohol and dissolve pool-shock → brew willow water + coconut water → build a crude sugar/mineral medium → gel with seaweed agar or float a raft → clean the mother plant → alcohol-then-hypochlorite-then-rinse → initiate → multiply → root in willow water or ex vitro → wean slowly → bank as slow-growth cultures + synthetic seed + dry seed. Cleaner hands and more patience make up for cruder reagents.
Making Your Inputs From Nothing
The five substitutions the whole collapse path depends on — in detail.
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- Sterile without an autoclave — tyndallization. A pressure canner at 15 psi is ideal; without one, a single boil won't do — it kills active microbes but not heat-resistant spores, which then germinate. Instead boil 30–45 min once a day for three consecutive days: each boil kills active cells, and between boils surviving spores germinate into vulnerable active cells that the next boil kills. Keep media warm/covered between rounds. This is the single most important skill in the collapse path.
- Disinfectant — distilled alcohol + calcium hypochlorite. Ferment any sugar source, then distill to concentrate the alcohol; cut to ~70% with clean water (pure is worse). For bleach, dissolve calcium hypochlorite (pool shock, stores for years dry) and let it settle — the clear liquid is your surface sterilant at roughly household-bleach strength. Wood-ash lye and vinegar are only weak fallbacks; don't rely on them alone.
- Auxin — willow water. Steep a big handful of crushed young willow twigs/bark in water 24–48 h. The result carries natural rooting auxins; use it as the rooting-stage liquid and as a free rooting dip on ordinary cuttings. Any Salix works.
- Cytokinin — coconut water. The liquid from a green coconut is the classic natural cytokinin (with vitamins and sugars). Add it at ~5–15% of medium volume to drive shoot multiplication. Immature-seed liquids and sprout extracts are regional substitutes.
- Gel — seaweed agar (or a raft). Boil red seaweed (Gracilaria/Gelidium) ~1 h, strain hot, and let it set; the improvised gel is weak, so freeze it overnight and thaw to concentrate it firmer. If gelling fails, skip it — float the explant on a sterile cloth/paper raft over liquid medium, which is often more reliable than fighting a poor set.
Crude minerals round it out: compost tea (broad nutrients), crushed eggshell (calcium), Epsom salt (magnesium), a light pinch of wood ash (potassium), rusty-nail vinegar (iron). Strain everything crystal-clear and heat-sterilize it hard — cloudy organic brews are the top contamination source in this world. Set pH near 5.6–5.8 with a red-cabbage indicator: vinegar down, ash up.
Common Collapse Mistakes
Read this before you start — most first-timer failures are here.
- Boiling once and calling it sterile. 100 °C leaves spores. Tyndallize three days or use the pressure canner. This is the #1 Branch-B killer.
- Cloudy improvised nutrients. Compost/manure/urine bases that weren't strained crystal-clear and hard-sterilized are contamination bombs.
- Wood-ash lye or vinegar as the main disinfectant. Too weak alone — get calcium hypochlorite or distill alcohol; ash/vinegar are only partial fallbacks.
- Gelatin cultures kept warm. They melt and feed bacteria. Keep cool, or use a raft instead.
- Crude hormones dosed by guess, batch to batch. Without consistency your notebook comparisons mean nothing — fix one method and repeat it.
- Bugs in the culture room. Mites/gnats walk spores into vented jars. A culture room must be a bug-free room.
- Skipping alcohol on the explant when you have none — expect much higher losses; prioritize distilling some.
- Direct sun on jars (using a window for light) — cooks the culture. Bright indirect only.
- No redundancy. Keeping a rare line as a single jar — one failure erases it. Back up as slow-growth + seed.
- Expecting Branch-A success rates. Start many jars, cull fast, and treat crude reagents as lower-yield by design.
Fix two things and most failures vanish: genuine heat sterilization (a true 3-day tyndall or the pressure canner — never a single boil) and still, settled, clean air with slow hands. Nearly every failure traces to one of those two. For symptom-by-symptom diagnosis of everything else — hyperhydricity, shoot-tip necrosis, browning, recalcitrance — see the master's deep diagnostics.