More Wild Cacti from Arizona

Here are a few more wild cacti finds from Arizona.

Here is the fruit of a pencil cholla cacti (Opuntia arbuscula) as you can see the fruit is very tiny and if you pick off all the little fuzzy stickers they can be eaten and are tart and sweet.

The trick is trying to harvest their fruit. They grow in a tangled mess and if you reach into the tangled mess to get the fruit you will most likely end up looking like a porcupine.

The pencil cholla is also called the Christmas cholla as these little fruits develop during the winter in Arizona. They look like little ornaments. I took one back with me to Illinois to try and see if I can get the seeds to grow... Illinois is quite a bite more humid than Arizona so hopefully if one of the seeds does grow it will like it in my window in direct sunlight.

Sometimes direct sunlight out in the desert can be too much for a cactus especially combined with winter freezes. This poor Santa Rita Prickly Pear got frozen at night then baked in the sun. Somehow it is still surviving, the desert is a tough place for everything.

Here is another species of purple prickly pear cacti Opuntia macrocentra. The main differentiator of this one is that it also has some green on its pads and the thorns are much larger than the Santa Rita purple prickly pear. Eventually the outermost pads turn solid purple.

I'm not sure what this one is. It looks familiar like I've seen it for sale at the garden section of Home Depot. But this one was out in the middle of nowhere.

It has a nice defense of thorns, perhaps to keep wild Javelina from taking bites out of it.

I suspect these are some sort of pincushion cacti. My best guess as to the identity is vivipara bisbeeana, if they were blooming it would be easier to identify them.

Here is the fruit of an Arizona barrel cactus (Ferocactus wislizeni). These can actually be cooked and eaten once the seeds are removed. They are often cooked with beans in various Mexican dishes.

The thorns on this cactus are quite strong. Native Americans used them as sewing needles. I would imagine they would also be good for trading to other tribes that could use them for fish hooks, sadly there are not many lakes or rivers in Arizona to fish in.

There is quite an insect ecosystem inside the thick thorns and grooves of the barrel cacti. Here is Narnia femorata aka cactus bug living the easy life protected by all these sharp thorns. The only predator brave enough to pick these guys out of the thorns would be the cactus wren with its long beak.

Barrel cacti get really large and are a common all over the desert of Southern Arizona. People use them as landscaping bushes since they require little water. They get most of their water from the summer monsoon season then store it in their thick body for the rest of the year. Everything else around them is dry as a bone.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)