New to keeping chams and, in fact, don't actually have one yet. Truth in disclosure, it's a project I've taken on with my soon to be 11-year old who asked for one. I've been researching everything I can for about the past 4 weeks and he's been really patient but we're still working on getting everything in and setup BEFORE we order the chameleon.
With the branches, I'd originally seen some selling online for as much as $35 plus S&H for six "sticks" basically. I thought that was ridculous and after reading several posts here at Chameleon Forums I was glad to learn that others had been successful at just harvesting branches themselves; which is what I wanted to do because I didn't want to spend nearly $50 for six sticks.
Anyway, my son and I went out to four different varieties of trees in our yard and cut some five branches yesterday. We removed all the leaves, smaller twigs and excess "nubs" - anything that seemed sharp in particular - and then set about cleaning them.
This is going to sound silly but I washed them in the dishwasher with no soap and used the "sanitize" mode which heats up the inside. I then placed them out on the deck to dry int he sun all today and I'm hoping that this is sufficient. Our trees are mature and haven't been sprayed with any chemicals in more than five years so they've taken on a lot of normal weathering since then. Rain, snow, wind, sleet, hail...you name it, we get in in the midwest.
Anyway, I'm hopeful we've done enough but there's still more to do. We also purchased four live plants from a nursery yesterday and we need to repot them which is the next step in the project.