Arizonan Harvests Fruit of the Cactus--Very Carefully

These are busy times for Marilyn Schirch. Shortly after sunup, armed with kitchen tongs, the 54-year-old grandmother ventures into her neighbors’ yards to harvest the ruby-red fruit of the prickly pear cactus.

Later in the day, she can be found in her kitchen making jellies and jams from the thorny plant. While the fruit has a strange, exotic taste, not unlike a cucumber’s, Schirch’s concoctions have a delicate, pleasing flavor suggestive of strawberries.

She has many competitors for the fruit of the cactus--among them ants, javalinas, chipmunks, coyotes, birds and rodents.

On one recent day, a coyote stood motionless, its eyes glued to Schirch as 100 feet away she methodically plucked the pears and placed them into 5-gallon buckets.

“I had a funny feeling I had just stolen that coyote’s supply,” Schirch said.

The Phoenix suburb of Fountain Hills, population 3,000, is best known for its 500-foot-high fountain--reputed to be the world’s tallest--and for Marilyn Schirch, often referred to as the Prickly Pear Lady.

While the cactus grows wild over much of the Arizona desert, with its long, thorny needles, the prickly pear is frequently planted for security reasons by homeowners seeking to deter break-ins.

Which explains why from mid-July to mid-September--when the huge green pads of the cactus are dotted with the ripened pears--Schirch’s phone rings often with calls from townspeople beckoning her to “Come and get ‘em.”

“They know the prickly pear fruit would go to waste and make a mess in their yards if I did not do the harvesting,” said Schirch.

A former elementary school teacher, Schirch, her husband, Reldon, 54, and their four daughters lived in Bluffton, Ohio, population 4,000, until they moved to Phoenix in 1976..

“I loved teaching but I always had in the back of my mind the idea that some day I would like to have my own business,” she said.

In 1982, when the three women who founded the Desert Kettle jams and jellies in 1979 put the business up for sale, the Schirch family bought it.

“I grew up on old-fashioned grape and strawberry jelly in the Midwest,” Schirch said. “I had never heard of prickly pear cactus before moving to Arizona.”

Today, she does it all--harvesting, preparation, packaging and selling her products from the Desert Kettle shop in front of her kitchen and to a dozen gift and gourmet food shops in Arizona and New Mexico. (Her husband and one of her daughters help out now and then, she added but not on a steady basis.)

The selection includes 11 kinds of jams, five jellies--including Prickly Pear, Jalapeno and Pyracantha--and five marmalades, all priced at $3.50 a bottle. Chutneys and sweet and sours are also available.

“It’s my thing, my avocation, my hobby,” Schirch said, noting her business grossed $100,000 last year. “I don’t want to sell 5 million jars and put my product on everybody’s shelf. I did 13,000 jars last year. That’s fine.”