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Incredible Edibles of the Arboretum

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Pineapple guava fruits. Photo: T. Stone

Did you know there is something to eat almost any time of the year on the grounds of Boyce Thompson Arboretum? We strongly discourage grazing the wild or cultivated plants at the Arboretum (in fact, it’s a big No No), but it’s still comforting to know that if marooned on the grounds, a person could survive for two or three days without significant weight loss.

I know this to be true because I have been recording the times that the Arboretum’s plants flower and fruit for more than twenty years. And I have a stack of 50 dog-eared pocket notebooks full of these notes to prove it. Even though every year is unique, two decades of recording have allowed me to make some pretty reliable generalizations about fruiting times.

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Harvesting Acorns

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Across central Arizona, at higher elevations (4000’ or higher), are found stands of Emory oaks (Quercus emoryi). Near Superior there is a swath of these oaks that extends from Oak Flat to Globe. They are tall trees – up to 50’ – with a dark fissured bark. The leaves are leathery, often with a few pointy “teeth” along their margins.

The acorns that these trees produce are small – about an inch long and less than a half inch wide. Acorns contain tannins, but some more so than others. In the case of the Emory oak, the acorns are fairly sweet and require little, if any, leaching. For thousands of years, people in this part of the country have collected and eaten Emory oak acorns. You can still see Apache and Tohono O’odham women out collecting these savory nuts this time of year. [Read more…]

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Prickly Pear Season is Here

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Prickly pear fruit

If you live in the Sonoran Desert then you know it is time to start collecting prickly pear fruit (tunas) to make juice and jelly. If you aren’t sure how to goabout picking the fruit, here is a quick review:

Harvesting prickly pear fruit

1) Prickly pear fruits have glochids (those tiny nasty spines! ugh!), so you always want to wear gloves and use tongs to pick the fruit off the cactus. If you try to pick the fruit with your bare hands, you’ll be extremely sorry.

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Learn your lizards with Steve Prager

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Audubon Naturalist Steven Prager Guides Learn-Your-Lizard Walks

Steve Prager holds snake, but lizards are all around

Photo of Steven Prager by Mark Williams

Arboretum nature walks bring a weekly opportunity to learn about plants, birds, butterflies, snakes, lizards, and critters from a variety of guides, each with a new perspective and different knowledge. Summer Saturdays on Aug. 13 and Sept. 10 you’re invited along for our 8 a.m. walk along the Main Trail guided by Steven Prager, a teacher/naturalist at Audubon Arizona’s Nina Mason Pulliam Rio Salado Audubon Center.

His Summer schedule is packed with surveys for Yellow-billed Cuckoos and other avian field work, but we caught up with Steven this week for a short interview about his fascination for snakes, lizards, and other “herps.”

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Centipede bites with a wallop

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wild man phil and centipedeWho will blink first?

“Wild Man” Phil Rakoci is one of the long-time tour leaders at the Arboretum. He handles critter of all kinds (like the centipede above), but specializes in snakes and lizards, and usually hauls a small menagerie of creatures along with him for his tours and other demonstrations. During the early morning Learn your Lizards tours at the Arboretum, he catches lizards and snakes that the group is lucky enough to find in the 1.25 mile walk around the Main Trail.

He is a consummate professional, and funny, too, bringing these creatures to life (as if they need any assistance) to school kids and adults alike. He might demonstrate how to properly handle a whiptail lizard without harming him, If he catches a bull snake, he’ll hold it firmly but gently, allowing people in the group to rub their fingers across its smooth scales. [Read more…]

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A boulder rolls to a safer place

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boulder

On Tuesday of this past week, a boulder, roughly 25 million years old, give or take, began to show some signs of instability. At some point in the past—we’re not sure whether it was decades, centuries, or millennia—it broke off the parent rock that it was once a part of, rolled once or twice, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never moved again.

For all of us, this king size piece of rhyolite has been a fixture of the local scenery at the top of the switchbacks on the Main Trail, only a stone’s throw from Picket Post House. It is big, probably 12 feet in its longest dimension and weighing countless tons, all of it bearing down on a slope that angles towards Queen Creek below. The Main Trail zig zags its way down the slope, and makes its first turn a few dozen feet below, passing directly in front of the boulder. [Read more…]

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Pulling weeds

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Pulling weeds along the Main Trail in Queen Creek canyon.

Even with all of the rain we received late last week, the moisture near the surface of the soil is rapidly drying out, but it’s still soft enough to go after those tough weeds like the pernicious grasses with thick fibrous roots that have been growing dangerously close that golden barrel, or the palo verde and mesquite seedlings from last year that are all but impossible to remove unless the ground is saturated—even then, they’re buggers to pull out.

I have great method for tackling these woody weeds while you still can, but first, I need to set it up with a story.

Togas

It is not widely known, but back in the olden days, when Arboretum staff wore togas of animal skins rather than monogrammed shirts in a plethora of trendy colors, none of the plants on the grounds were formally mapped. [Read more…]

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The Flight of Frutarians

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fruits comparison graphic1 400x copy

From left: Condalia globosa, Geofroea decorticans, Celtis pallida, Sambucus sp., Berberis sp., Koeberlinia spinosa

It takes a patient, thoughtful observer like Arboretum volunteer and birder Jack Bartley to point out the mid-summer bounty of fruit-eating opportunities for wildlife at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. It’s not only about the ripening of red, ripe saguaro fruits–which is huge–but also about the fruiting potential of hundreds of other plants, like desert hackberries and condalias that are growing in the Arboretum’s plant collections and dare to fruit in the middle of the summer. Jack is keenly aware that knowing what birds eat is the best way to find them, and he reminded me of a half dozen fruiting shrubs that he had seen earlier that day. [Read more…]

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Monsoon storm damages DELEP shadehouse

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shadehouse flattened2

Photo: Ken Koppola

6-27-16

Editor’s Note: This post comes from DELEP Program Director and Curator Matt Johnson who lives in the northeast part of Tucson. The University of Arizona (UA) farm is located on Campbell Ave. near the Rillito River.  The DELEP offices are located on Allen Rd. about a block east of Campbell Ave. in the Arizona Crop Improvement Association (ACIA) building. 

The monsoon started at my house this past Saturday with 0.53″ of rain over an hour from a beautiful thundershower. A few close lightning strikes but no violent winds. The rain was spread out over an hour so all of it soaked in. This ties with 1984 for the second earliest start to the monsoon (my definition = 0.50″ of rain in three consecutive days) in the past 33 years at my house.

In contrast, the UA farm was hit by a microburst from a thunderstorm Sunday afternoon that had winds of at least 80 or 90 mph based on the damage. The DELEP shade house was flattened. The steel bows that form the structure tore out of the base–the steel actually tore! Amazingly, the greenhouses on either side (with inflated roofs and paneled sides) were unscathed.

There was no damage to the ACIA Bldg. where our offices are located, but a large mesquite limb missed crushing the compressor unit for the walk-in seed storage freezer by inches. There was a ca. 6′ tall jojoba that had been growing in the yard of the house to the east of the ACIA Bldg. that is now about 100 feet away beneath the mesquite at the entrance to the ACIA Bldg. parking lot. The wind literally tore it out of the ground and turned it into a tumble-jojoba! We lost a few trees in our fields with major limbs blown out of others. S

There was some roof damage and lots of downed trees in this part of town, including a large Eucalyptus camauldulensis that fell on a building along River Road, and several olive trees that were blown right out of the ground down the street from our office.

 

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Queen of the Night

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Photo: Jeff Payne

Peniocereus greggii, also known as “queen of the night” or more generically, “night blooming cereus,” is an elongated, spindly cactus with a number of representatives in the Arboretum’s collections, particularly in the Cactus and Succulent Garden and the Demonstration Garden. It is also a common native plant in the surrounding desert, usually growing under foothill paloverdes, ironwoods, and mesquites, but can also be found growing through dense shrubs like creosote and jojoba. Its overall appearance is unbalanced with gangly, angular stems that are barely the thickness of a breakfast sausage. The stems have a muted, dull green color that serves as excellent camouflage, making them easy to miss, especially in low light. The stem diameter at the very base of the plant is nearly the same as the diameter of the stems two or three above the ground, giving the plant the look that the slightest wind could bring the poor thing crashing down at any moment. [Read more…]

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