Nopalitos

My grandma's house, where I lived when I was a kid, had a great little farm in the backyard with fruit trees, edible prickly pear cactus, a vegetable garden, and chickens. Taking care of the chickens was fun - although cleaning the coop, not so much. Gathering the ripe fruits and vegetables from her garden was my favorite thing. I picked pomegranates, figs, limes, and almost everything else. My best memories are eating the figs right after picking them from the tree; milky syrup would run through my fingers. Opening the warm fruit and tasting its sweet pulp was glorious. 

The adults were in charge of picking the cactus fruit and pads, which we called by their Spanish names, tunas and nopalitos. Before the adults let you work with the spiky harvest, you had to master avoiding the thorns. My grandma cut the nopalitos into tiny cubes and put them in small plastic bags for my sister and me to sell for 5 pesos a bag. Once they were all bagged, we went house-to-house in our neighborhood to sell them.  

A year ago, my partner and I decided to start a little garden in our backyard. We skipped the chicken coop. We were determined to build everything on our own and bought the lumber, a drill, and everything else to make four raised beds and a compost bin. The most challenging work was filling the raised beds with dirt. It took us several hours, but we were happy with the results and decided to make four more beds. Later, my partner added a homemade irrigation system and connected it to our new rainwater harvesting tank. 

My partner does all the hard work: seeding, watering, harvesting, and even cooking it all! Once in a while, I'll pick some chard for a stir fry or rosemary for homemade pizzas, but most of the time, I watch him do the work. I guess when it comes to backyard farming, I'm better at selling nopalitos than anything else.