8 Edible Wild Plants of Arizona's Sonoran Desert (And How to Use Them!!!)

hello there my name is matthew hunter with legacy wilderness academy in this video i'm going to share with you some of the most common and important edible plants of the sonoran desert before we start though i'll mention that if you actually look at the link below this video you can get my free sonoran desert plant ebook where i share with you some of the most common plants in the sonoran desert we're actually looking at in this video how to identify them their edible uses where they grow and all of that so without further ado let's go ahead and jump right into it the first plant we're going to be looking at is called the palo verde tree now many of you are familiar with the palo verde tree because it's arizona state tree but for those of you who aren't familiar with how to identify the tree let's go ahead and look at how to identify it and then we'll talk about its edible uses so the really the number one way you identify palo verde is by its green bark if we move these uh branches out of the way you can clearly see that it has distinctly green bark okay now the species we have here is called the little leaf palo verde or the foothills palo verde and it's identified by its tiny little leaves if you look really closely at the leaves here you can see just how small the little leaflets are and a lot of times there won't really be a whole lot of leaves on the tree but it's a sort of summer right now right after the monsoon rains and so it's nice and leafed out but a lot of times the leaves will fall off and because this plant has green bark it's still able to photosynthesize even without leaves so that's how this plant is able to be so successful in the desert because it can completely shed all of its leaves and that allows it to not lose a whole lot of moisture while at the same time still being able to get energy from the sun so what part of this tree is edible well you can see here that it has a few little beans well really just the pot the casings left on it and every spring okay around the month of may this is gonna be putting out edible beans and so in april the whole desert is going to light up light up with yellow flowers and then we're going to see the beans come out the young immature beans are the best they can be right off the tree or better yet give them a nice little boil and they can be eaten just like edamame okay so they call it desert edamame or if you wait until they mature most people don't eat them like that but historically they were ground up into a flower which was an important staple food so they can be toasted it's best to toast them like in a cast iron pan on low heat very briefly give them a nice little toast that improves the flavor and then they can be ground up into a flour which provides an important staple food okay the next plant we're going to be looking at is called the choya cactus now you can see here how to identify the choy cactus it's really distinct it's by its sort of segments it's sort of long finger-like segments and there's a number of different species of choya you have the teddy bear choya the jumping choya those ones look a lot more sort of fuzzy and really they're just like they're just covered in thorns even more than these here now what we have here is called a buckhorn choya now not all of the choi produce edible buds but the buckhorn choya they do they in the spring they produce these buds and what the buds are is essentially right before the flower opens it's the immature flower bud and these are going to be ready around easter okay so around easter a little bit before or maybe a little bit after that's when the buds are going to be ready and the buds were actually an important staple food they were harvested in large amounts and dried and they constituted a large part of the diet of native americans living in the sonoran desert region and people still eat them to this day myself included and so what you want to do to remove the thorns is you twist them off and i actually have a whole video demonstrating how to do this but uh you you get like a tray so you get it's like sort of like a tray uh traditionally they had certain baskets that was used to do this but you basically get a tray and on the bottom you put a screen okay so sort of like an arc archaeologist sift box okay so basically a quarter inch screen on the bottom of this sort of tray and then you shake the buds all around and it removes a lot of the thorns then you boil the buds and the rest of the thorns they soften up when you boil them and they can be removed by hand it's sort of a long process but you know historically chole buds not only are they high in vitamins and minerals and things like that but and calcium but they were a very important trade item so they were a staple food and trade item okay so next spring be on the lookout for cholla buds and you can find resources on exactly how to do it sort of a long process but definitely worth it now because we're in the desert we might as well go through all of the main edible cactus species in the sonoran desert the next plant we're going to look at is called the barrel cactus now the barrel cactus is usually about a waist high or you know knee to waist high cactus and it has a sort of like pinkish thorns here on the top you can see they actually have sort of a pinkish color the barrel cactus in the wild usually don't have you know these big magnificent fruits you can see the ones here are sort of green it's the summer right now and they'll eventually turn yellow but you know throughout the town any town in the sonoran desert where barrel cactus are planted oftentimes they do a lot better because they're able to get a little bit more water but the edible part of this cactus is the yellow fruit and so the yellow fruit has a sort of sour flesh and black seeds on the inside they're really easy to chew through so you can eat the flesh you can chop it up finely you can put it into like a fruit salad you can put it into smoothies whatever you want to do or just eat it raw and then the seeds you can take out and you can actually sort of toast them and you can put them on like in salads or whatever whatever you really want and it adds a nice little sort of crunch to whatever you add them to it's really a nice little fruit and seed fun little plant to experiment with and you'll see these yellow fruit all over the cities in the sonoran desert towns anywhere the barrel cactus is planted and gets just a tiny bit extra water you're going to see these bright yellow fruits all over the place the next tree we're going to look at which is growing right next to our palo verde tree is mesquite so mesquite trees many of you have heard of because mesquite wood is really common in you know like for smoking or for a barbecue but a lot of people don't know that the beans themselves are actually edible so let's look at how to identify mesquite and we'll talk about the beans the beans were an important staple food very very important i would actually say that mesquite beans were the number one staple food the at least the most the number one wild harvested staple food for native americans and it rivaled corn in its importance for the native american diet so let's look at how to identify this and then we'll talk about how the beans were actually used so you can see here what the leaves look like and they they sort of come down like a y so you can see my index finger here is where the leaf starts then it comes down and it splits into a y just like that now there's a few different species of mesquite the one that's most commonly used in landscaping is the chilean mesquite so it's a south american species and the beans don't taste nearly as good but because you can find thornless varieties of the chilean mesquite it's usually planted in landscaping instead of the velvet mesquite which is our most common native species and i highly recommend you plant native velvet mesquite instead of chili and mesquite if anything because it tastes better but it's also better for wildlife i think insects are more attracted to this tree and that's why birds actually use it more for foraging at least that's what has been said by some people so let's look at how to identify it by the bark okay you can see the bark of the mature trunks here is a dark brown color sort of a shaggy dark brown and that's how you identify mesquite when you're out in the desert it's one of the biggest trees out in the desert especially along the rivers but it can grow throughout the desert and it has this dark shaggy brown bark whereas most of the trees out here don't have bark that looks like this you have your palo verdes they have green bark or iron wood trees have gray bark and then the mesquite trees have the dark brown bark so that's how to identify it now let's go ahead and talk about the beans so if you've lived in the sonoran desert for any amount of time you've seen the mesquite beans that fall to the ground every may and just litter the floor in the desert with these with these tan beans now a lot of people sort of they know they're edible but they don't really know too much about them mesquite beans are one of the most unique beans you'll ever hear about because it's not the actual bean on the inside that you're really going after it's actually the outer pod so you know most beans like the type you buy in the store the outer pot is removed and then it's the actual bean you're eating but with mesquite it's the opposite we're actually going to grind up the beans whole and the flour that's resulting is sweet to the taste so it's naturally sweet and it's the outer pod that you're actually eating and it's this carbohydrate rich and sweet flour that we mix 50 50 with wheat flour and we bake with it so mesquite beans were important staple food and i actually have a video where i show you how to harvest the beans and i have another video in my course that i show you how to identify the tree how to harvest and how to do everything with the mesquite treat but for this video it's just a quick overview so let's go ahead and go on to the next plant okay the next plant we're going to look at here is a prickly pear cactus and the prickly pear has two edible parts it has the pads which are a vegetable once the thorns are removed and the pads are going to be ready in the spring whenever the new growth is coming now they can be eaten all year long but they're the best whenever they're growing fresh out of out of the cactus at the beginning of the year in the spring okay now the part i like to eat though is not the pads which can actually be bought in the store but i like to eat the fruit so prickly pear fruit gets produced in july and in the landscaping cactus around the city can actually produce at different times of the year but really starting in july and all the way past december every once in a while so it has a pretty long season for the city but for the ones in the wild it's usually july and then all of the birds have eaten them by the time august really rolls around okay so the fruit though they're really delicious they have like a melon-like flavor they're really really juicy you'd be surprised how like you kind of wonder how a cactus can produce such juicy delicious fruit but they do have these little hair like thorns on them called glowkids that have to be removed the easiest way to remove them well there's two options one you can twist them off with a pair of tongs and literally sweep them around with uh maybe like a bundle of creosote or a bundle of vegetation sweep them around on the desert floor and that'll actually remove 99 of the thorns but another thing you can do is just put them directly in the blender thorns and all and then filter them through an almond milk bag or any other fine material like cheesecloth you'll squeeze the bag and then all of the thorns will come out then i like to take the juice that i've just done that with run it through the almond milk bag a couple more times just to make sure all the thorns are out and then you can drink the juice but drink it quickly because even in the refrigerator it starts to firm it very very quickly within the matter a matter of two to three days it starts to ferment and not into alcohol okay but into more of like a vinegar so you have to drink it really quick or it'll go bad all right the next plant we're going to look at is a shrub called wolfberry so wolfberries are the most common berry in the sonoran desert they're really easy to identify when they're fruiting and there's a number of different species of them so here we have some of these orangish they can be orange or red berries and when you open them up they're going to have tomato like seeds on the inside so that's how to identify them is a shrub with orange or red berries and tomato like seeds okay so that's wolfberry but i always teach my students that it's important to learn how to identify a plant when it's not fruiting because it's most plants only fruit or you know put out beans or whatever for a very short period so it's best to learn how to identify plants without its edible product that way you know what it looks like and you can come back for it when it's in season so let's look at a few ways you can identify wolfberry say if it didn't have berries okay so here we have another wolfberry shrub growing close by looks like it's a different species the leaves look a little different but most wolf berries are going to have what we call spatulate leaves so if you look really closely you're going to see that these leaves are what we call well they're called spatulate for a reason it's basically because they're wider near the end of the leaf than at the base okay so it has sort of like a spatula shape all right and the um branches are really sort of like thorny shrubs but they're a certain type of thorn we call a spur branch so you can see here they're not like the type of thorns is really going to hurt you but it's sort of like a little branch that comes out and then it dies at the tip so it's not a proper thorn but it's what we call a spur branch so you can see here right here how it comes out and it's actually like a little branch but then at the tip there it sort of dies and sort of when it dies it sort of has a natural point so you can easily sort of brush by these things they're not really going to poke you but uh you just need to be aware that's what it's called a spur branch and then lastly the bark of these wolf berries is usually going to be a brown color or sometimes it's actually like a brick red color so like almost like a mahogany brick red type color so that's how you're going to identify wolfberry now not all wolfberries are equal some of them are going to taste more bitter actually sometimes if you taste one the first impression is that they're not very good because they're bitter other ones are going to taste more sweet the best ones taste like sweet tomatoes but in my plant walks people usually love to eat wolf berries so there's really two seasons for wolf berries you have the ones that are ready in april and then you have ones that are ready after monsoon in around august so there's really two different seasons depending on the species of wolfberry so let's go ahead and check out the next plant while i was on the way i noticed that there was some of this white stuff that you a lot of times we'll see on prickly pears and a lot of people sort of get confused at what this is the first time i ever saw it i was like what is this nasty stuff it looked like wet toilet paper or something but this uh this white stuff here is kind of interesting it's actually caused by an insect called cochineal and let me take some of this off here this is a prickly pear cactus this insect actually was used as a red dye by native americans you can see the red color that's coming off on my fingers there and watch what happens when i squish this it almost looks like blood coming out and it's this it's the insects themselves so they actually produce this really bright red color and so anytime you see this on cactus you know it's an insect that was used as a red dye now obviously you know you really don't want cochineal on your cactus at home because they can actually take over a whole patch of prickly pear and completely destroy it so some people say to rinse it off you may have to look up what to do i'm no expert on how to get rid of this stuff but just an interesting little side note while we move on to the next plant and we can't do a video on edible plants in the sonoran desert without mentioning the saguaro cactus everyone knows a saguaro cactus right but a lot of people don't know that this plant is actually edible so every may saguaro cactus produce flowers you'll see these big white flowers at the top and then around the month of june the flowers turn into fruit which start off green then they'll turn pink and they'll actually split open sort of like an alien egg at the top and they will expose this bright red fruit now this fruit historically was harvested with poles and it was knocked down and then picked up and put in baskets and then boiled down to a syrup so the seeds which are a lot like barrel cactus seeds they're a small black and easily chewed through they were separated and added to foods ground up or whatever and then the flesh itself was boiled down into a syrup so saguaro fruit one time provided the major sweetener in the sonoran desert region it was the major sweetener saguaro syrup okay before the introduction of sugar to this region now it's really really hard work getting saguaro fruit down with poles in the modern day what i recommend doing in years that there's really high production is the fruit will actually dry up and this is going to happen around early july you're going to be looking for these they're going to dry up and fall to the ground and a lot of times they'll sort of fall into the shrubs and stuff surrounding the cactus you can see this one has a bunch of little shrubs and you would want to look in all these little shrubs for for fruit that have sort of caught in the in the shrubs the ones that fall to the ground the rodents will usually get them but yeah in years of high production you'll be able to get these dried fruit and they are delicious really really sweet tasting they sort of taste like a strawberry fig is what i say and otherwise the reason they were harvested with poles is because most years they don't produce enough to fall to the ground and the birds will get all of them before they fall to the ground so you have to harvest them with poles but this year the fruit had a really really low production so you couldn't even get any with poles the birds just got them all before they even ripen but that's just how it goes so it's really spotty production but some years when they do produce really really good you're going to be wanting to look in early july for the dried fruit now if you happen to find yourself in the sonoran desert uplands the higher elevations in the sonoran desert then you may run into this plant which is a common component of these higher elevation areas and this is called the turbinella oak so turbinella oak or quercus turbinella is an oak species it doesn't look like a lot of other oaks because the desert species of oak tend to have these more sort of thorny appearance on the leaves sort of like holly leaves and the desert oak produces acorns just like any other oak it's probably one of the most drought resistant oaks definitely in the u.s maybe even in the world here so it kind of doesn't really reach the size of a large tree but usually grows more as a shrub and just like any other oak the acorns can be shelled and then ground up and leached so you have to leach acorns to make them edible because they have bitter compounds in them called tannins and so the tannins make it to where the acorns can't be eaten raw in large amounts but once they're leached they are a major staple food okay and then here here i'm just going to pick one of these leaves off so you can sort of see what the turbinella oak looks like okay we also have um other non-native oaks that grow in the landscaping in the sonoran desert like quercus virginiana the virginia oak and that one actually produces really big acorns i think they're ready around the month of february if i'm not mistaken and those could actually be a important food in an emergency is those virginia oaks but we also have another upland species here growing right next to it that looks really similar and probably is confused a lot with the turbanella oak and this is i think is holly leaf buckthorn so you can see the leaves are more of a lighter shade of green or i should say a deeper shade of green so they're more deep green whereas these are more of a blue-green on the turbinella oaks and you can even see there's like a little red berry down here for this little look-alike species this is not edible so the holly leaf buckthorn i think is what this is called has red berries and it grows in the same habitat as the turbinella oaks here in the sonoran desert uplands but throughout most of the sonoran desert you won't find these i do think though it would be an excellent plant to add to your landscape as long as you can give it a little bit of afternoon shade and maybe a little bit of extra water should be able to do good down in the valley especially in tucson where it's a little bit higher elevation than say phoenix or something like that well guys i hope you've enjoyed learning about some of the common edible plants in the sonoran desert now these plants were all in one small little area i don't think i walked more than 25 yards to find all of them but the thing is is that most of the plants in the sonoran desert have a very short season so only the wolf berries were in season and the rest of them are in season at a different time of the year so it's good to start learning them now and learning their season that way you can be ready so if you want to learn their seasons and you want to learn more about how to use these plants remember you can click the link below to download for free my sonoran desert foraging ebook and you can also check out my course on sonoran desert plants my video course where i show you how to identify all of the major plants in the sonoran desert the edible ones that is how to harvest them process them when to you know when to get them with a calendar you can also get the full version of the ebook and that is also going to be below in the description of this video so click the link and get my free sonoran desert ebook and if you're interested in the course check that out too thanks for watching and i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Legacy Wilderness Academy

Views: 25,497

Keywords: edible desert plants, Arizona edible wild plants, Sonoran desert edible plants, native, edible cactus, tree, edible trees, arizona desert, edible desert trees, cacti, drought tolerant, phoenix, tucson, foraging

Id: PF7g1o6W7lU

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022