Learn from home!

I am living in a lovely little casita situated in the back yard of a larger home on a 2-acre property just slightly east of Tucson. (After my discouraging foray into the world of house-buying, this is probably where I'll be living for the next few months....) The resident owners are 21st-century homesteaders. As a family, they have created a delightful garden/playground for their children, and in one corner of the yard is a chicken coop of about 30-40 hens and one rooster. The casita is situated opposite the chicken coop, which can be a mixed blessing: all the eggs I want to eat, but kind of chicken-poop smelly on rainy days. The family doesn't know it (and the chickens probably don't either), but this big back yard is serving as a fascinating classroom for me. Don't know something about desert environments? Wait a few days. Something new will appear.

The back yard is planted with an assortment of mostly columnar cacti, including saguaro, bishop's cap and totem pole species. There is also a prickly pear, the pads of which are occasionally knocked off by the youngest child driving her toy Jeep around and around in a big circle. There are several large agave plants of the type with wicked little black hooks at the tips of their leaves. The owners have also planted plenty of desert flowers, including yuccas, poppies, milkweed, vitex bushes and others to attract bees and hummingbirds. There are a couple of very tall pine trees near the main house and maybe a dozen or so mesquite trees scattered around. And there are several raised flower beds filled with more flowers and many many tomatoes. There is no grass. There might have been some sort of grass when it was cooler, but it has withered and dried as a result of several weeks of 100-degree days. The Catalina and Rincon mountain ranges are visible to the north and east respectively. In all directions, there is sky -- usually blue, with white puffy clouds. That changes during monsoon season, at which time I can see four or five different types of weather taking place as I scan the sky from east to west and north to south. All of this adds up to enough visual stimulation to keep me occupied and out of mischief. However, due to my horticulture background, I am particularly intrigued with the business of being a plant in this place. And plants here are forever changing. Often rapidly, or so it seems. A few weeks ago, shriveled black blossoms of the saguaro cactus began dropping to the ground. These were all that were left of the beautiful white flowers that appeared at the top of the cacti in mid-May. The shriveled blossoms were brittle and papery and had rows of tiny yellowish spines. They fell if a flower was not fertilized and therefore on its way to making a fruit. (More on saguaro fruits in a bit....) My ancient French bulldog thinks everything she finds on the ground must be tasted to determine whether it belongs in her life. She thought these shriveled little nubbies were manna from heaven, and she sought them out for a few days -- until she started noticing the spines. That's when she stopped chewing on them.

Last week it was mesquite bean pods, which Ms. Frenchie with the Indiscriminating Palate assumed were all meant for her, as well. They are edible, and they are safe for dogs to eat in moderation. But these were like crack to her. She liked them so much she was inventing excuses to go outside to find them. I plucked a few green pods off the trees to feed her because they weren't so tough and fibrous. She wanted more. She sought pods on the ground that had already ripened. The beans in these ripe pods were fat and hard, like pieces of gravel, and the pods were leathery, but she was still chewing on them as if she needed them to get through the day. Well, she chewed on them until she realized that her tummyache was from eating too many bean pods. She has tapered her pod habit somewhat.

Then came the saguaro fruits. These are pods of a different type that form at the top of a saguaro about a month after the cacti bloom in May. When the fruits are ripe, they split open to reveal a seed-filled sweet red goo much revered by the birds, bats and bugs that can reach them at the top of a saguaro. Humans either have to harvest them with long poles or wait for them to fall to the ground, and then we must compete with the ants and other sweet-eating bugs for a taste. I first noticed these red fruits about a week ago during a drive through Saguaro National Park East. Since then one or two have fallen from the saguaro in the back yard of the casita. Ms. Frenchie with the Indiscriminating Palate sampled one and decided that the ants were too numerous to really enjoy the fruit. I tried sampling it, but at that point the goo was kind of a combination of dog saliva, ant spit and whatever else had crawled into it, so it didn't taste very good. Last night it rained. This morning there were half a dozen or so fruits on the ground at the base of the saguaro in the back yard. The dog and ants still hadn't found them at 6 a.m., so I sampled a bit of the goo. It has the texture of a mashed strawberry -- including numerous small, black seeds -- but the taste is not as sugary as that of a strawberry. It tastes like -- red goo.

The Tohono O'odham harvest the fruits and make jams, syrup and wine of the goo and flour and animal feed of the seeds, according to information on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum website. Ripening of the saguaro fruits marks the start of monsoon season and has special significance in their calendar and ceremonies. The things one learns....