United States or Macao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In Texas the plant is gathered in large quantities and ground into a fine pulp by machinery which is then mixed with cotton-seed meal and fed to cattle. The mixture makes a valuable fattening ration and is used for finishing beef steers for the market. The cholla, or cane cactus, is also a species of Opuntia, but its stem or leaf is long and round instead of short and flat.
The return to Can Mallorquí was sad and silent. Pepet led the way, the bimbau between his lips buzzing like a gad-fly. From time to time he stopped to throw a stone at a bird or at a puffed-up black lizard darting among the opuntia cactus. Little impression did death make upon him!
When this process is duly effected, the cactus opuntia, or prickly pear, is planted, which hastens the desired event, and has the power to break up the lava, and render it fit for productive purposes. Five miles from Trecastagne is Nicolosi, a small village which has often suffered from the fire-vomiting mountain. Here we supped, and baited the mules for two hours.
Naturally it can be made from either Opuntia Fiscus-Indica or Opuntia Tuna, but a combination of these two gives the salad an exquisite appearance and a tiny touch more delicious flavor, because Tuna, which is red, has to my taste a trifle richer and fuller flavor than Indica, which is yellow. Both fruits taste more like the best well-ripened watermelon than any other I recall.
The fruit of Opuntia differs in character and structure from the ordinary kind of fruit, such as apples, pears, &c. It consists of a branch, or joint, modified in form, and bearing on its flattened apex a flower, with the ovary buried in a slight depression in the fleshy joint.
The hill of calcareous breccias, which we have just mentioned as having once been an island in the ancient gulf, is covered with a thick forest of cylindric cactus and opuntia. Some of these trees, thirty or forty feet high, are covered with lichens, and are divided into several branches in the form of candelabra.
They had left far behind them both wood and swamp; and, though the mansion seemed to be embowered in the green shade, they had to cross open ground to reach it. At length Azua, who had sunk into a despairing silence, cried out with animation "Ha! the opuntia! what a fence! what a wall!" "You may know every deserted house in the plain," said Aimee, "by the cactus hedge round it."
As stocks for grafting, many of the more robust kinds of Opuntia are well adapted, and very singular-looking specimens may be obtained by making the most of this fact. One of the crested or monstrous forms, when grafted on a flat-stemmed kind, presents the queerest of appearances, looking like a large green cockscomb growing out of the top of a bladdery kind of stem.
Word Of The Day