Are there any truly thornless cactus plants that have tasty fruit?

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Do you know of a variety of thornless cactus that grows tasty fruit?

I ask because I’d love to grow cacti that give me tasty fruit, but I don’t want thorns. I have small children – and honestly, I have my very clumsy self, too.

I’ve looked into the thornless prickly pear, but it turns out it’s not truly thornless – it still has all the little itty bitty spines that hurt the most when you accidentally touch them. So that kind won’t do, even though I love the fruit and would love a truly thornless variety.

The only kind of thornless cactus with fruit I’ve found so far is banana yucca. They do have nasty sharp pokiness at the ends of the leaves, but those sharp tips can be cut off without hurting the plant, so that I’m willing to deal with. It just means semi-regularly trimming the tips of the new leaves, which is not a big deal. I’ll be planting seeds for them this year.

Any more ideas?

If there are multiple thornless varieties or cultivars for the same species, I would certainly be willing to landrace them. Especially if thornlessness is easy to maintain (for instance, if it’s a recessive trait).

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Dragonfruit have spines, but they can’t penetrate my skin. The fruits are spineless.

I never had a better mindfulness teacher than the thorny cacti, especially cholla.

cactus-fruits

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Ha ha ha! Yeah, I bet!

Hmm. Do you think dragonfruit spines would be harmless to tender little fingers? There may be a difference between what injures a three-year-old’s fingers and what injures an experienced farmer’s.

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My first word as a toddler was “hot”. I learned very young to not touch the wood burning stove.

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Ha ha! I bet!

That’s a fair point. Still, there is my own clumsy self. I have a tendency to trip and fall on . . . things. :wink: I try so hard not to, but it’s really hard for me! I suspect I have a condition called dyspraxia that makes coordination very difficult for me. Just because I know exactly what I shouldn’t touch because it will hurt me doesn’t mean I always have control over it. Given that I’m that way, and I’m almost forty, I can’t rule out the possibility that my kids will never outgrow that stage, either.

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It amazes me how many people will rub cactus against their face at farmer’s market. Or pick them up with their hands.

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:scream:

I can see picking them up with your hands if you’re being really thoughtless, but rubbing a cactus against your face?!

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Almost…there is a variety of prickly pear that has minimal spines, easy-to-use and to clean spines from fruit by floating in water and stirring, pour off water then repeat about 5 times. Its nearly the start if harvest for the tunis, just awaiting one good rain so they will be bursting with juices.

How do i share photos in these reply boxes?

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Doesn’t it still have the glochids, though? Those things are nasty.

If it’s glochid-free, I’d be very interested.

I’m pretty sure you share photos by hitting the “upload” button (which looks like it has an upwards arrow on it). Then you can upload some pictures to post them.

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Carpobrotus edulis has tasty fruit, though it cant take a hard freeze and needs decent mineral levels (like the seashore) to fruit well. Hylocereus is close to spineless but very tropical.

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You can also include photos by just copying them from wherever and pasting them right into your post here. My phone photos automatically load to Google Photos, so later, when I’m at my PC and reading forums, the easiest thing to do is pop over to my open Photos page, grab and image and paste it in here.

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There are three types of thornless cactus species I’ve found so far that sound interesting. Here they are:

Bishop’s cap cactus: Only hardy to zone 10. There are thornless varieties, and the fruit is edible. The fruit is tiny on top of a huge plant, and it tastes like dragonfruit.

Epiphyllium: Only hardy to zone 10. It’s a thornless cactus that grows edible fruits that taste like a cross between dragonfruit and passionfruit. The flowers are gorgeous. It’s temperamental.

Sin Espinas dragonfruit: Only hardy to zone 9. The only thornless variety of dragonfruit. There are other dragonfruit varieties with better flavor, but it’s still very good.

Sadly, I’m in zone 7. For someone in zone 9 or 10, however, those may be interesting to try!

The most promising thornless edible cacti I’ve found for my climate, so far, are yuccas. There are a lot of different species, and from what I’ve read, they’re all edible. (Palatable is a different matter, and the roots of all species are non-edible; they can, however, be used for soap.)

Yuccas aren’t exactly thornless, in that they have sharp pokes at the ends of their leaves, but since those sharp tips can be easily cut off with scissors without harming the plant (unlike thorns), I consider that acceptable.

Adam’s Needle yucca is the most common landscape yucca, and they’re everywhere in my city. The flowers and green seed pods are edible, and taste like green bell peppers. I don’t like peppers, so that’s not a good food source for me, but it may be for other people.

Banana yucca is the yucca species I’m planning to grow. It makes a fruit that tastes like a cross between blueberries and molasses, which sounds delicious. I’ve read that the fruit needs to be bletted, like persimmons, in order to develop its full flavor; alternatively, it can be baked.

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Agave might be worth considering too. The syrup from the heart is a pretty substantial yield.

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Oh, agave is a very interesting idea! I didn’t even consider that! Looks like it’s hardy to zone 5, and of course it’s very drought tolerant, so it would probably do great in my climate.

Aloe is another succulent I’ve considered – since it’s edible as well as medicinal, and boy is it useful for sunburns – but it looks like it’s only hardy to zone 8. It might still do fine with a bit of winter protection, though. It’s something I’d love to have available in my yard, because it’s easy to get sunburns here.

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Aloe isnt quite as edible as people claim. It is definitely carcinogenic in rat animal models. Plus it tastes like ear wax and snot had a baby.

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Ugh! Good to know. Sounds like I probably shouldn’t eat it, then. That’s a pity!

It’d be great to have aloe available for sunburn protection (and/or alleviation), however.

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Definitely a great medicinal. Just one of those useful medicines that got turned into a “super food” to sell products. The Aloe genus is large and cross fertile, so you could try a really long shot project to turn it into a leaf vegetable, but I would worry about having to sample thousands of bitter hybrid seedlings to make any progress. For example, professional chilli breeders have to taste thousands of seedlings and end up with mouth/throat cancer more often than you would expect (source- I heard this from a pro chilli breeder on a podcast a while ago).

Bulbine might be a more useful genus in the Aloe family to consider since it seems to have more borderline edible uses in wild species.

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Fascinating! If there’s a large genus of cross-fertile aloes, that sounds like a great project for breeding. Are there any species that are particularly fertile, particularly useful for sunburn relief, or particularly cold hardy? If so, those may be good candidates to cross for breeding.

Your warning about tasting a whole bunch of marginally edible plants sounds wise, so I think I’ll avoid doing that.

That interesting fact about peppers reminds me of this quote!

Wild foods tend to be judged by different standards than familiar cultivated ones. If a wild plant, unfamiliar as a spice, had the same physiological effects as a small quantity of jalapeno pepper (burning sensation in the mouth and throat, irritation of the digestive tract prompting often severe diarrhea, to name the more obvious) it would universally and unequivocally called toxic. Jalapenos are toxic; we just eat them anyway.
(Samuel Thayer, The Forager’s Harvest, page 34)

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Also, which species of agave would you particularly recommend? It looks like there are a bunch of different ones.

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The most cold hardy aloe is A. polyphylla I believe. Comes from high altitude and often gets covered in snow. Though I don’t come from a cold zone so I don’t know all the details about hard freezes versus insulating snow cover issues.
Aloe vera and barbadoensis are the two varieties used for medicinal purposes around burns etc. Both seem to be hybrid clones that were created thousands of years ago. A. ferox is used to produce a medicinal resin in south africa as well I believe. Breeding plants to become better medicinals is an area I think has been thoroughly neglected so far in human culture, apart from a few random lucky crosses. Aloe leaves are usually full of saponins and other nasties, so breeding them to be less toxic/non toxic could be a challenging project.

With agaves I am less familiar with cold hardiness, other than knowing a few spineless species which are nicer for gardens like attentuata and vilmoriana. A. sisalana is another example of an ancient random hybrid that has been grown as a clone for thousands of years. Breeding agaves could be tricky since their flowering is sporadic and spread out by many years. You would need a really large population to reliably have flowers on hand for crossing (and then you would need to be dangling off the top of a ladder to hand cross them).

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