Plant · P-529

Prickly Pear Tuna

Opuntia engelmannii

Prickly pear tuna is a fast-growing clumping cactus whose flat spiny pads and sweet red-purple fruit are both eaten - the fruit fresh or juiced, the pads cooked as a green vegetable once the spines are singed off. Cattle, sheep and goats browse the singed pads as a drought feed, though it has to be balanced with fibre and protein since the pads are mostly water. Left alone it spreads on its own, from bird-scattered seed and from broken pads that root wherever they land, so a stand needs occasional thinning to stay a hedge rather than become a thicket.