The listing, Giant Orange Prickly Pears! (15+ seeds) has ended.
After bragging that those huge purple prickly pears (the baseball-sized ones in my other auction) were the biggest ever, I found another contender! This one has tequila-sunrise-orange fruit...maybe a bit smaller - but they're delicious!
And they're also WAAAY bigger than the normal little oval fruits on all the other prickly pears in the county. (Just for comparison: the small oval purple fruit on the sidelines in 2 of the pix was taken from a "typical" prickly pear -- and that's a quarter in the pic, not a dime!).
Super fruit! the sort of salmon-colored skin hides and incredible red/orange/gold interior: rich flavor, juicy, not too many seeds - the juice is a beautiful golden orange color. What can you do with it? Tasty enough to eat fresh (many p.pears aren't), you can also juice it to make jelly or syrup, which in turn can be used in punch or margaritas - very colorful!
And, of course, you can eat the pads - 'nopales' are a staple in Mexican cuisine. This specimen has the flat oval pads that are common to prickly pear - but this is a virtually spineless variety, and even those sneaky glochids (the fuzz-button prickles) seem to be fairly subdued.
In this climate (northern California) the fruit ripens in mid fall (like now) and hangs on well into January (or until someone comes along and takes it all!). Prickly pears are hardy in USDA zones 3B - 11 - quite a range!
So here's the offer: 15 (at least) fresh seed