Procedure:

• Get your stuff.
• Dry it as much as possible - this makes life easier later on. You will never get all the water out, but too bad.
• Chop it up as fine as possible: a blender comes in handy. You may wish to chop then dry. A word of caution: try to avoid exposing your stuff to excessive heat. I dry in low heat oven. Heat and air destroy good compounds from upwards of 100 degs C. All this bit will depend on exactly what you are extracting.
• Once it is finely divided - powdered if possible, put it in a big container, and cover it with methanol. Alternatives to methanol here are ethanol (not as good) and acetone (good solvent - rips the crap out of anything, but is more reactive - can react with your actives).

Now, depending on what your stuff is, you have to let the methanol have time to remove it all. This is best done by leaving in a quiet warm place for a few days, even up to a week, and shaking it occasionally so it is mixed. Some papers recommend solvent extraction (soxhlet apparatus) and refluxing at the boiling point of the methanol (80 degs or so - I can't remember). I usually just rely on time to get the good stuff out. When you are ready (early in the morning), filtre the muck, to give you methanol+dissolved brown gunk, and a residue soaked with methanol. The residue still contains a lot of good stuff, so soak again for an hour, and repeat, and do a third time if you are feeling generous (3 is the magic number in extraction work).

When you are done, there is another thing you can do finally, if desired: depending on what your stuff is, mix it up with dilute hydrochloric acid, 1M is appropriate. let stand for an hour, then filtre (this may be very difficult) That will get the last of the alkaloids out of the substrate.

You now have a methanol-plant stuff mixture, and a dilute HCL-plant stuff mixture, if you bothered to do that part.

Evaporate the methanol, to leave a small amount of goo. This will contain water, a bit of methanol, and all kinds of resins and muck, and if you are lucky, the alkaloids.

If a very quick and crude extraction was all that was desired, then after stripping the last of the methanol with vacuum if possible, this residue could be smoked, eaten or whathaveyou. I leave that to your discretion. However, if a cleaner product is desired, the double layer extraction will need to be performed.

Combine the evaporated methanol gunge with the hydrochloric acid filtrate if you have any. If you don't then mix the methanol stuff with an excess of dilute (1M) HCl. Feel free to filtre again at this point. Anything of marginal solubility here is no good to you. Get the stuff as clean as possible. Boiling with activated charcoal is another useful trick for removing gunge. Just boil it up, and filter off the charcoal for a cleaner brew.

You should now have an acid aqueous solution of alkaloids and water solubles from the plant.

Take your acidic solution, and basify. This is done by mixing in dilute sodium hydroxide (I use up to 5M to save on total volume. Be careful with concentrated NaOH - apart from eating skin, it eats alkaloids) As you mix in the NaOH, you will see swirls of white precipitate form and redissolve. Continue until the white swirls stay, and until the solution is quite cloudy. Indicator paper is necessary to see that the solution is basic. If you can't get indicator paper, you can make an indicator by boiling up some purple flowers. The dyes in most flowers go bright red in acid, and green in strong alkali. Just a drop of dye and a drop of mixture should tell you what is acid or base.