Fruiting Lophophora

Just a quick question,
Two of my Loph's have set fruit, this is the first time I have had a fruit on these, I am just curious as to what do next? There are a tonne of ants lurking around, so I moved them inside so they dont steal them.

Also, when do I harvest the fruit?

~Kandahar

Leave the fruit on them till they start to shrivel up. Most or all of the seeds will be ready for harvesting once the fruit are starting to dehydrate. You CAN harvest the fruit before it has started to wrinkle up, BUT at that stage many of the seeds will probably not be ready yet, so you will have reduced seed collection.
Here is a photo of a pile of harvested fruit. Notice there is a lot of flower material, and completely dried fruit (no longer pink, but the seeds often still germinate fine).

Next I separate the fruit into 2 piles, one that is dried flower, husk, and any plant matter that definitely has no seeds, and the other with seeds, and any part of the fruit or flower that may be concealing seeds. Seeds can often fall out of dried fruit, and get lost in the hairs, or dried flower parts. So be thorough and remove as much of the non-seed bits as you can find, so you have the piles looking like this:

Now take the seed pile and put it into a container that is half filled with water. A baby food jar is OK, but a test tube or a medicine bottle with a cap is best. Most seeds need to be wet and hot for hours before germination will start, so don't worry about soaking the seeds at this stage. Fill the container half full with room temperature water, close it tight and shake it as hard as you can. This will clean up much of the loose materials sticking to the seed shells, and will separate most of the rest of it:

You can pour out most of the water through a coffee filter, until there is only a little water left with all the seeds. Spread out 1 or 2 paper towels, and pour out the rest of the seeds onto the paper towels. Most of the fruit & flower particles will stick to the paper towel, so you can move the seeds around on it with your hand, and they will dry off, and be cleaned in the process. I advise to put them back in the container, half fill with water and do it all over again. At least twice in total, but some seeds do best if you do it 3 or even 4 times. Might seem like a lot of work, but it's worth it when you can be pretty confident that your seeds aren't going to have rotting plant matter on them, which causes you to lose a whole container of seedlings to mold or other nasty things. Although I don't give the seeds a dip in any chemicals at this stage, some people recommend giving them a short bath in a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide as well, for additional protection.

When you have done the seed wash 2-4 times, and dried them out, you should have a nice clean pile of seeds ready to be planted:

this thread should be renamed IXOXI's Lophophora Seed Tute, haha.

Thank you so, so much. At the moment they're still white ect so I will follow your method step by step once they ripen up. I didn't expect a response this informative! I take my hat off to you sir! Thankyou for taking the time to show me this, i apreciate it

just a side not, roughly how long does the fruit take to completely develop? A couple of weeks I would presume?

Thanks.
~Kandahar

This process works for most hard seed types like Ariocarpus, Lophophora, Mammillaria & Trichocereus.

You can still use it for some of the more fragile softer seed types like Astrophytum, though with some of those, you should take extra care not to shake too hard and damage them, also to make sure they dry off afterwards fairly quickly. For Astros I use as many paper towels or napkins as it takes till I am sure they are dry. For the last bit, make sure to spread them out a little so they are not in a pile, and can dry individually. Leaving them heaped with water between can possibly trigger germination if they are left that way too long. In my germination trays, I have had some Astro seeds start to open their casings in around 12 hours.