Datura Meteloides

The seed of this plant got imported into our garden with some horse manure - sigh. The scent of the flowers is truly gorgeous but I've read that all parts of it are highly toxic. I don't know what to do with the now seeding plants. If I put them in my 'stinky pot' (a barrel of water where our 'invasive' plants go) will the plant tea produced be toxic and therefore I'd be giving that toxicity to my edibles? I guess I could ship them off to the local tip but that seems very un-permaculture.

http://www.plantsofthesouthwest.com/Sacred-Datura-Jimsonweedbri-Datura-meteloides/productinfo/P1500/

12 bucks for an ounce of seeds, it toxic but not aleopathicaly toxic like watering your garden with soaked fresh cedar juice. It's mainly a matter hallucination and anything that can do that has the potential for overdose.
The worse i can imagine is it wigging out soil life but you could probably get arrested if your slurry was that strong. If it came in through horse manure and it was as bad as imagine there should be a dead horse to go along with it.

Maybe I should try selling it then -I've got loads

I was really worried when I found out what it was as I thought that our free-range hens might eat some and die but they avoid it. Amazing how most animals know what's bad for them (just humans I guess that have de-tuned from this inate knowledge)

The great thing about most toxic plants is their poison's are usualy suited to their predators. I have a plant called buttercup which gives blisters in the mouth "Only to Mammals" the ducks have been trained to chomp it down, I have a jungle of mint family plants which ducks wont touch but RABBITS come down hard on. There's a terribly poinsonous plant at the edge of the property called giant hogweed, it can leave your skin burnt for years after contact, but the shoots are edible for just a few weeks all i'm missing is a hog.

Its crazy how with enough research almost everything has it's match. In the case of Datura it could be "stoners"

I found a variety of Datura growing in my garden a few years back and had to look it up.

I ended up on a druggie site reading people's insane trip experiences. That sounds like a brutally scary thing to ingest.

Stories of people unable to urinate for a day, meeting their dead families and running face-first into concrete walls repeatedly.

It's probably got some kind of a good use, though. And it's true that stoners buy it, meaning there might be income there, but there may be some crazy DEA laws prohibiting that particular application of "the problem is the solution."

Heh.

Good question on the tea, though. I've thrown some toxic plants into my manure/compost tea and figured the other plants won't have a problem with them.

We used to ingest a small bit of leaves to stop running nose. When I was a young fellow I took a goodly amount, it was terrible, the thirst could not be quenched by drinking, eyes stayed dilated so reading was impossible. This lasted for hours.
It does work for colds.

Atropin sulfate [from Datura] is used in products like Dristan[if they still make it] for cold and flu. It is used in old country meds.

definitely one to be careful with... there is the classic mnemonic for symptoms of poisoning by anticholinergic compounds:
"blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, the bowel and bladder lose their tone, and the heart runs alone."

One way or another your weed sure packs an exciting amount of drana, nothing like fiddling through the garden then tripping for hours in your own greenhouse.

Ingesting datura has caused people to jump out of buildings and start eating their own flesh

I've always had a pretty...relaxed...attitude to most drugs. Datura, not so much. A friend spent a blind and naked night in the police cells once...
I'm pretty sure it'll be fine in your 'stinky pot', but I'd get them out asap.

"Ingesting datura has caused people to jump out of buildings and start eating their own flesh"

Tax season has similar effects.

Though whoa... reading datura stories is alternately horrifying and hilarious. I'll stick with my homemade hooch. I don't even want to be near that stuff.

be careful handling it when you do remove it. the active constituents in question are easily absorbed through the skin, so wear gloves.

potentially a very useful plant, though. in extremely low doses, scopolamine (an alkaloid found in Datura species) completely prevents motion sickness. a scopolamine trans-dermal patch saved my landlubber self from a whole lot of misery during three days of extremely nasty conditions. I don't know of an easy way to extract the useful bits at home, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. caution and respect would certainly be in order.

My goodness - what a plant! So I guess that it's OK to compost the seedlings then as I think there'll be loads. I wore gloves to cut off all the seedpods as quickly as possible after I found out what they were (but the seed pods are SO interesting) and I put them in a bucket until I worked out what to do with them. This bucket has filled with water and I've just noticed that the ducks, the geese, the cats and even the dog drink from that bucket - either they like the effects or there are none.