Ye Olde Prickly Pear

One type of cactus you can always count on is the Prickly Pear whether you like them or not. They come in all sizes from the flat pads, spines, small glochids, itchy to downright painful.  Prickly pears always are around.

From the Opuntia family these cacti are found in all the major North American deserts.  The Great Basin is North America's largest desert. And one of the few species of cacti that live there are the opuntia polycantha.

This lovely cold hardy cacti was one I encountered as a young boy in Sandy, Utah along the mountain foothills. I ran into a giant colony of them and screamed all the way home. Now I raise them, how irony changes a hate to a love.

Lewis and Clark as they came across the continent noted that the prickly pears were everywhere and they had to watch out carefully or they would step in them. The thorns went through their moccasins (OUCH!) and were a constant nuisance.

The one thing you can count on with prickly pears though is that they flower. In fact all cacti are flowering plants.  Prickly pear have a variety of blooms from crimson red, to pink, to orange, to white, and hybrids of the above. This specimen was taken at the Idaho Arboretum in Boise.  One last flower before the summer fireworks were over for the year.  Just how big can a colony get? Well that varies. I have seen them as high as six feet and wide as ten feet.  They propagate by sexual reproduction, the flower, and thus fruit and seeds, and by dropping pads. A disconnected pad will take root and start a clone of the parent plants.

I am not sure if prickly pear or any other cacti for that matter send out rhizomes, so help me out here in the comments section if you have an idea.

I can only imagine Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery encountering colonies like this mile after mile. This type of large colony is not unusual in the wild if the plants are in the right area for sun, moisture, and nutrients.  They love well drained soil and that is where you will find almost all species of the prickly pear.

The last photo is from the Colorado on the Colorado Plateau. This bunch was on a cactus Wikipedia page about cacti for awhile. And then the anal retentives decided that their pics were better than mine. But this batch has made it back because the blog belongs to Dave, yours truly and Kirk the other guy who occasionally posts here. So here I will round out my blog on prickly pears for this cactus episode.  Maybe next time I will blog about Home Depot cacti, but then maybe I wont.

Why Cactus?

Cactus have never really been my thing growing up. When I was seven we lived about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah in a mid size town called Sandy. We had large fields around our subdivisions of suburbia.

I would used to go out into these fields of sagebrush and play with my friends. One day while playing, I stumbled across a Great Basin Prickly Pear with long sharp spines. It was also colder that day and the barbs went right into my leg.

I ran home crying in a lot of pain and my mom got the barbs out with a pair of tweezers. I never really took to cactus after that. I mean they were cool as back drops in a Western and anywhere that I wasn't. But to be honest, pain was not my thing.

It was many years later that I met a friend of mine at my current work, who now lives in another state. He and I became fast friends. He let me come to his house and I saw this bizarre yard.

He had cacti, mostly prickly pear everywhere. He also had some palm trees. I thought to myself "This is an interesting chap." He was really enthusiastic about palms, cactus, and other tropical stuff. If it was a challenge to grow outside of the traditional zone, well Kirk was the man.

It soon became of some interest to me after a few trips we took out west of Utah Lake in Utah. Slowly he sucked me into his world and I began to grow prickly pears. The same kind of plant that stuck me in the leg some 25 years earlier.

The rest is history. That is how I came to love cacti. Now I have mini barrels, large barrels, golden barrels, beaver tails, prickly pear from the Colorado Plateau and Mojave Deserts, hedgehog cacti and chollas.

It is a wonderfest of pain but very beautiful when they bloom. I have always liked stuff that was a bit off the mainstream. I live on the line between the Great Basin to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east.

It forms an interesting microclimate of moderate winters and hot summers with nice spring and fall seasons.

We have a true Indian Summer here. It is nice to see such hardy plants survive in and outside. More about cacti later. But if I figure if I am going to have a hobby, no pain, no gain.