Tasting Hardy Prickly Pear Cactus Fruits (Opuntia phaeacantha “Orange Form”)

I was out in the garden today and I spied some fruits on these hardy prickly pears.

I bought a plant a couple of years ago from Mahoney’s Garden Center and put it in a pot in a south-facing spot near my chimney. Through benign neglect, it has escaped its container and colonized the dry sandy soil along the pathway. Though this species is native to the southwestern US, it seems to be very hardy and has made it through two winters here in zone 5b with no problems. However, they do get very shriveled and dead looking when it's cold.

 This form has nice showy orange flowers in the early summer, and then makes these fruits.  These fruits are pretty small. I attribute part of the small size to the fact that I didn’t water these at all for the entire summer, and they were in pots! Did I mention they are indestructible?!

The fruits are not very thorny. You have to watch out for the glochids (those little, fine, hair-like thorns that sprout from the spots on the fruit). I brushed them off with a paper towel, but I missed two of them and they stuck in my hand. OW! I read somewhere that you should use tongs to handle them, but I guess I am the foolhardy type.

I thought I would try seeing how these tasted, since this was the first year they fruited for me.  They have been ripe for a while, but I was too busy to notice them.

I cut them open and found they were full of seeds and pulp, just like the “tunas” at the supermarket but smaller. The pulp is sweet, but it was very gluey (mucilaginous). You can see how sticky the seeds were from this photo:

Perhaps they would be better if I had harvested them more promptly and given them better growing conditions. I will try again next year!

I’m going to plant the seeds in pots and grow them indoors for fun.

Grow Wild,

Susan



Why grow wild food in your garden?

I’ve always been a big fan of eating wild food, ever since I was a kid growing up in rural New York State. There is something magical about walking through the woods and meadows and seeing all this food just sitting there for the picking. For FREE! And if it’s picked at the right time, it’s fresh, delicious, and it tastes like nothing you can get in the supermarket.  

The problem is, there are a lot fewer places to go to find wild food nowadays. 79.2% of us Americans live in suburban or urban areas, where there are regulations about how high our grass can be, and “waste” places and empty lots are frowned upon. Wild places like state parks and wildlife preserves have regulations against picking, for conservation purposes. There are just too many of us humans around to let us all go running rampant. So what is a gardener to do?

Well, my idea is to grow all those tasty plants I like in my back yard, so I don’t have to drive 20 miles to find them.  This is no revolutionary idea; all of the cultivated plants we eat today started out as wild foods. The tasty carrot was once the stringy Queen Anne’s lace. The amber waves of grain were once some clumps of grass. If the ancient people could tame these crops, why can’t we do the same for our wild foods, which are already good tasting?

Well, it turns out that there are reasons that farmers don’t grow these plants. One of the reasons is tradition. People won’t buy weird stuff in the supermarket, and no farmer in his right mind is gonna go out and plant stuff that no one will buy.  Even some “normal” vegetables, like scorzonera and rutabaga, suffer this fate. But this is no reason for gardeners not to grow them… after all, we grow stuff that we want to eat, and if it’s weird, so much the better!

There are some real roadblocks to growing wild vegetables, though, and these roadblocks are what I am going to try to overcome in the coming years:

1.  A lot of the wild plants are perennial plants, which require more than one season to grow. I think that this can be an advantage for the home gardener, if the yield is high enough, because you only have to plant once, and do maintenance thereafter. It’s sort of like growing strawberries or fruit trees in that way. The problem is to get the yield up to amounts that make it worth the extra time to grow.

2. Some of these plants are TOO easy to grow. That is, they are weedy, and once you plant them you can’t get rid of them. Jerusalem Artichokes and milkweed are famous in this way. I actually find this an advantage, since I live in a place where it is hard to grow anything. However, because they are weedy, most of the instructions I read on the web are about how to KILL the plant, not how to grow it for best harvest! We need information on best spacing, fertilizing, etc.

3. Some of these plants require unusual soil characteristics. Cattails will only grow in a swamp, not in regular garden soil.  You may be lucky enough to have a swamp in your yard, but I don’t, so this poses a challenge to the gardener. This problem is not insurmountable; look at all the people around the world that grow rice!

4. Finally, some of these plants are not tasty…I mean, not tasty right away. Some of them need special preparation before their true goodness comes through, and some of them are rather small and are a little more trouble than they are worth to grow.  So there is some room for selective breeding to make the plants have better characteristics.

I will be writing about my efforts to overcome these challenges in this blog. I hope you will join me in my efforts to broaden our palates and preserve our heritage. I’d love to hear from you if you share my vision!

Go Wild!

Susan