PRICKLY PEAR PHENOMENON
You might have noticed the maroon shades of prickly pear fruit as you drive by boulevards and admire yards in the Phoenix area in recent weeks. One of the most most common varieties of prickly pear is Engelmann's Prickly Pear (opuntia engelmannii), but there are between 150 and 180 different varieties of opuntia (known for their edible fruits and pads) that grow from western Canada all the way to the tip of South America!
While it's fun to admire the lovely blossoms and fruit, the prickly pear has more to offer than her good looks! There are at least thirteen edible varieties of prickly pear described as tasting sweet, sour, tart, and bland. A couple are said to taste like a honey dew melon while another is described as a cross between a banana and a mango. If you're feeling adventurous, you might consider trying one of these prickly pear recipes, or if you're feeling particularly plucky, you might make an entire prickly pear breakfast including pancakes with prickly pear syrup, cactus and eggs, cactus fries, prickly pear jelly on toast, and a prickly pear and berry smoothie! YUM! If you do try a prickly pear recipe, please make sure that you pick the fruit from someone's yard and not a protected area.
It was not as easy as you might imagine to find information on how to identify different prickly pear varieties, and we learned there's a reason for that! First, prickly pear reacts to changes in the environment, and this causes "changes in growth form, spine numbers, flower color and other characteristics." Additionally, prickly pear often grows over a very large ranges exacerbating the varieties in these characteristics. Finally, prickly pear can reproduce by dropping their pads and cloning themselves, and this often leads to cross breading with near-by relatives creating a wide variety of hybrid species.
We found this resource from Texas A&M provided some additional interesting information if you'd like to do some more research. Regardless, we hope the next prickly pear you see will shine with new light.
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