.

.

Friday, November 16, 2012

It's done this way...no, that way...oh, this is how....













The next few days I will be blogging about the cactus crop......quite a bit......there is so much about this subject to share with you... the reader.

 Earlier this week I was harvesting the cactus fruits, which required a lot of pruning of the nopales (leafs). I say there was at least 800 pounds of the stuff in a pile....on the street side.....that lasted less than four hours after I posted a "free" ad at craigslist.org
  Many folks stopped to chat with me...about all this cactus business, asking the big question: how do we pick the fruits (known as cactus fruit, cactus fig, Indian fig or tuna in Spanish). Farmer Deno did a lot of research on this. U-Tube. Google. Yahoo. Forums. I read about leather gloves....then it was metal thongs....then the crazy idea of cut n drop into a bucket. Seems that I am the only one with a real good way to harvest! 
 The thongs in this picture have two spoon like holders at the end...made of hard rubber. It's a perfect tool for this harvesting of tunas! Walmart has these for about three bucks.
 Before you start screaming at me...perhaps pitching some thorns at me...for throwing away the nopales, it is a one time action. Also to say...I started to extended to crop this past week. More on all this in the next few days.