4 TESAJO (tess-AH-hoe). Tiny edible tomato-red fruits, ready in November and December, give this little member of the cholla (CHOY-ya) cactus group its other name: Christmas cactus.
5 YUCCA (YUH-ca). This very useful plant provides many things. Leaf fibers make strong thread for mats, string, rope, sandals, nets and snares; the buds, flowers, fruit, stalks and seeds are edible. The root contains saponin, useful as a medicine or as soap or an excellent shampoo. Sharp leaf tips make good awls.
Yucca
A prehistoric sandal woven of loosely spun yucca fiber.
Mesquite leaves and beans
6 MESQUITE. Pods and beans of the mesquite (mes-KEET), nutritious and sweet, are still an important part of the desert Indian’s diet. Pods are ground into flour and pressed to make little loaves of staple bread. Fermented, the same flour makes an intoxicating drink. The sweet sap of the tree can be used to make candy, black dye, or even glue for broken pottery.
Mesquite has invaded vast areas during the past century, areas once desert grasslands. Cattle, grazing this land since the 1870s, have eaten away the grasses, encouraging growth of woody species like mesquite. The sweet mesquite pods are a favorite cattle food, and the beans pass unharmed through the digestive tract to be deposited far and wide. A natural cycle of drought and erosion coupled with heavy grazing has destroyed much of the desert grassland and converted it to mesquite. With loss of the grasses, erosion has accelerated, springs have dried up, and formerly sandy and smooth canyon floors (once suitable for small-scale farming) have eroded to boulder-strewn wastes. In less than a century we have made drastic changes in the desert, changes whose consequences we are only beginning to see.