Herb of the Week: Prickly Pear

Now for something completely different...Prickly Pear.

Recently, my wife, daughter, and I made our annual spring sojourn to Arizona, land of the young springs.  There we spent time in the Sonoran Desert, a truly remarkably landscape filled with amazing fauna.  There is an abundance of exotic foods and medicines to be found there including Green Ephedra (a.k.a. Mormon Tea), Agave (source of Agave Nectar), Wild Goji bushes (Lycium species), Desert Lavender, Octotillo, Cholla cacti (whose buds are edible), Creosote bushes, and Mesquite trees (medicinal sap and seed pods can be made into a nutritious and yummy flour).

Amidst the return of old friends (meaning all my plant buddies of course!), I reconnected with the one plant from the desert that I actually knew before I got there: Prickly Pear Cactus.  While this plant is abundant beyond belief in the Sonoran Desert, it has a surprisingly wide range of distribution.  I have found this cactus in Illinois, Pennsylvania, the San Juan Islands of Washington State, and Montana.  Other folks have told me they have found it in Michigan and New Jersey as well.  In fact, it seems to thrive in any sort of rocky desert micro-climate even at decent elevations.  Well, besides being a very adaptable cactus, what other mysteries does the Prickly Pear hold?  Read on and find out!

Prickly Pear-Opuntia species

Description: A cactus with distinctive paddle-like lobes covered in 2 kinds of needles: long easy to see sharp ones and small delicate hairs that are incredibly painful and difficult to remove.  Red-purple "pear-like" fruit appear on the cacti in the summer time.

Harvesting: Prickly pear can be quite difficult to harvest, even with gloves.  A pretty decent method is to knock off a relatively young paddle (they grow out from one another) with a stick.  Then using another stick repeatedly flip the paddle on the ground breaking off needles and hair.  The same method works with the fruit as well.

Uses:
1) Fresh Poultice-The inside of the paddles (fresh or old) make an amazing skin poultice.  Paddles should be harvested as described above and then split in half and applied topically.  The fresh poultice treats cuts, scrapes, rashes, bruises, sunburns, and snakebites! 

Yes, snakebites.  Prickly pear poultices were one of the traditional remedies for snake bites including rattlesnake bites!  The poultice was applied directly on the bite.  The plant is often abundant in the same areas as rattlesnakes.  Of course, seeking modern medical help is probably a really good idea.  But snakebites can happen in remote areas far from medical help.

2) Food-Both the paddles and the fruit are edible.  The younger paddles can be sliced up and cooked, and in fact are the famous nopales of Mexican cuisine.  The sour and somewhat slimy cooked nopales are traditionally good for battling summer time extreme heat and fever.  The fruit can be eaten fresh, but is quite seedy it also clear heat and is cooling.

3) Syrup-The fruit can be harvested in quantity and boiled down into a sweet syrup.  Harvest the fruit and be sure to clean off as many needles as possible.  Then cut up the fruit and cook on a low heat (seeds and all).  Then strain the seeds and pulp out saving the beautiful purple-red syrup (no sweetener is needed and is not desirable).  This syrup can be added to cool drinks in the summer time to clear summer heat or fever and add nutrients.  However, it is more importantly used as an adjunct treatment for Diabetes!

That's right the sweet syrup has been shown to be effective in treating type 2 Diabetes by lowering blood sugar and is used as a treatment in Mexico.  If you have Diabetes and wish to try this remedy further research is recommended and be sure to work with your doctor or health care provider.

Keep your eye out for this very useful plant in unlikely areas!  Or if you're in the Desert Southwest appreciate it's abundance almost everywhere!