dancing with the prickley pear

After our Saguaro fruit adventures Jay and I were both excited to see the fruit on the Prickley Pear Cactus were turning red.


We got up early last weekend, donned gloves, hats and backpacks with water bottles and headed to the trail head near our house.


Our elderly neighbors recently told about the tiny needles of the Prickley Pear fruit and how they get stuck in your skin and are painful and hard to get out. It wasn't long before we discovered just what they were talking about. I quickly declared my job was to take a tool and scrape as many of the needles off the goads (small bumps where the needles grow) as possible before Jay picked the fruit. That way I had very little contact with the offending prickers.


After filling a backpack with fruit and a rubber glove with pickers we headed home with our haul. After researching on the Internet, we decided we would burn the needles off the fruit and then hopefully be able to cut them open and extract the fruit without further pain.

That evening we set up a table outside where we could be cooled by the misting system and set to work. It was after midnight before we finally stopped...with a pile of fruit still remaining. Unlike the Saguaro fruit, the seeds in the Prickley Pear fruit are big and hard and undesirable in jam.

Between the prickers and the seeds I was happy to hear my husband announce that this was going to be our one and only experience harvesting Prickley Pear fruit.