Saguaro Fruit Harvest

To harvest the saguaro fruit, one person uses a long pole made out of a saguaro rib (they're inside the cactus, kind of like strong sticks that are the skeleton of the saguaro) to knock the fruit to the ground while the other person holds the bucket and tries to catch the falling fruit.

Eating saguaro fruit! It tastes like a very mild strawberry with lots and lots of black seeds.

The saguaro fruits are the green knobby things on the cactus. Some of them are open and you can see the red, seedy fruit inside.

You can practically feel the heat just by looking at this picture...

The first couple fruits that we collected.
This week we went to the reservation of the Tohono O'odom out in the middle of the desert to learn about and participate in the saguaro fruit harvest. We learned that these people believe the saguaro to be their dead ancestors, and the harvest is a very special time. However, this is a tradition that is largely dying, because many of the people can't take the time off from work to spend more than a month camping in the desert to harvest the saguaro fruit.

Harvesting goes like this: one person uses a long saguaro rib to hit the fruit down from the cactus, while another person stands beneath with a bucket to catch the falling fruit. It was fun, but also hard work.

After harvesting, we cleaned the fruit, which entailed peeling off the outer green covering to reveal the bright red seedy fruit beneath. We then ate a traditional meal of beans, homemade tortillas, and cholla (it's a type of nasty cactus) buds (which tasted an awful lot like artichokes).

As dusk fell, we listened to stories about the traditions of the Tohono O-odom people and marveled at the millions of stars that twinkled brightly in the black sky.