Find the potential of your yard and property!
Robin will help you plan YOUR yard — including identifying
your plants…both native and exotic,
and recommending new problem-solving plants and ideas,
from pathways to yard design!
Do you long to know more about your own yard and property? Would you like to walk through your yard/property alongside a plant expert to identify any plants you don’t know, both native and non-native, and get ideas for other plants that would thrive in your yard? Would you like to get suggestions about planting hardy, drought-tolerant, attractive, desert-friendly plants, including trees, shrubs, and perennials that can help you reach your highest dreams for your property?
Landscape planning with views in mind
If you want to achieve your goals for enjoying your yard to its fullest potential without having to contract an expensive landscape architect, consider inviting botanist and designer Robin Kobaly into your yard for a personal consultation. Robin will help you appreciate and identify what you already have, and suggest what plants, pathways, or other strategies or structures you could incorporate into your landscape to solve issues you may have with landscaping, views, privacy, wind, hot walls, soil challenges, or problem spots. Robin will share easy, concrete steps to help you successfully plan out a functional, sustainable, low-maintenance, attractive landscape plan to empower you in creating your own dream yard – yourself!
Robin identifies yard plants, and shares traditional and modern uses of native plants.
Robin will bring plenty of supporting materials to help you envision your yard’s potential, and supply photos of suggested plants to fit your yard’s needs. She will suggest a variety of methods that are easy but effective in achieving a landscape plan that suits your individual desires, personality, passions, moods, entertainment essentials, as well as considerations if you have children or pets, while providing suggestions to help you solve persistent problems on your property. Robin also can share homemade remedies that you can easily make yourself to solve common garden problems such as powdery mildew, insect attacks, rabbit munching, etc.
Imagining a new backyard plan
Your yard consultation will normally last about 3 hours, during which Robin will answer your questions, offer ideas about how to plan your yard to achieve your dreams and desires, present ideas about what plants would do well on your property to achieve those goals (and where you can buy those plants), and give you valuable tips on irrigation for success. She will share secrets about how you can discover your best approach for getting the most enjoyment from your yard by knowing what to focus on to achieve great results. Robin will also identify all the native plants you may have on your property, and introduce you to some of your native plants’ special qualities and uses that you can incorporate into your own life.
Robin takes notes and makes yard sketches throughout your session, and gives you the notes and sketches at the end of the session. You will be able to work from the design sketch that you and Robin create together, with a list of plants, hardscape options, and other landscape ideas to help you implement those proposals. Robin will also give you a permanent discount card for 10% off any plants or garden supplies you purchase at Cactus Mart in Morongo Valley, which carries many native and drought-tolerant plants besides cactus. You will be given a number of complementary handouts that Robin has produced that are helpful for your yard landscaping.
Creating yard plans with Robin
The fee for this personal yard consultation is based on yard acreage and distance for travel. Please email or call for a quote for this service on your yard or property. We are excited to meet you and your yard, and to discuss and brainstorm your dreams and goals for your yard. We love helping people get excited about reaching the potential of their yard. This is a very fun experience for both of us!
To discuss your personal yard consultation, call (760) 363-1166 or email robin@powerofplants.com for a quote and to schedule a fun journey into your own yard through the eyes and experience of a seasoned botanist, Robin Kobaly.
Secrets of Making Painless Cactus Apple Juice
~ How to Make Your Own “Ruby Nectar” Juice
from Prickly Pear Cactus Apples ~
If making your own healthy drink from cactus fruits that you harvest yourself sounds intriguing, but the spines put you off, we have a solution for you. This simple method doesn’t involve burning off every spine, cutting or scraping off each spine cluster, or even wearing thick, spine-proof gloves. You can put away your matches, knives, scrapers, and gloves. All you need is water.
Tufts of tiny, barbed, hair-like spines called “glochids”
dot the surface of prickly pear cactus fruits.
This easy and effective method to remove the tiny, hair-like irritating spines (called glochids) from prickly pear cactus fruit is a family secret we’ve decided to share with everyone. My family also developed a method to extract the pure juice that is so easy, you’ll have to try it to believe how simple and tidy it is. We have such fun making this specialty beverage at our home, we think you, too, will enjoy the amazing ease of creating this healthy, “wild” drink.
Of course, there is another option: you can buy prickly pear cactus fruits, called cactus apples, cactus pears, or “tunas” in Spanish, from your specialty grocery store or farmer’s market, and the spines will have already been removed. However, you can expect to pay about 99 cents per fruit, a hefty price compared to what you find for free if you just cruise down any southwest neighborhood and discover yards with thousands of cactus apples on prickly pear cactus going mostly unappreciated and unused.
“Prickly Cactus Pears” for sale in a grocery store for 99 cents each –tiny spines already removed.
In the southwest US, fruits of the native Engelmann prickly pear (Opuntia engelmannii) are often used by residents and by commercial producers of prickly pear syrup and candies, and unsweetened juice. Across the rest of America and around the world, fruits of the prickly pear native to Mexico, Opuntia ficus indica, are the most harvested, as that cactus has been taken from the Americas and spread all over the planet starting with Columbus.
Here’s your key to harvesting, processing, and extracting pure “Ruby Nectar” cactus juice with no risk of spines in your fingers and minimal clean-up from start to finish. You will never need to touch the fruit with your hands during the entire process, and all the tiny glochids will just float away, never to cause any problems on your skin or in your mouth!
Harvesting cactus fruit with tongs. “Cactus apples” on prickly pear cactus usually ripen from June until September or October.
1. Scout out prickly pear cactus around your neighborhood, and watch for ripening of the fruits (“cactus apples”) from June through September or October. Cactus apples are ripe when they turn deep red, maroon, or in some varieties, bright yellow. Ask permission from neighbors to harvest their fruits if you aren’t the lucky owner of a patch of your own.
Spray water with a jet-stream nozzle, creating a whirlpool to tumble cactus fruits against each other to dislodge the tiny spines into the water.
2. Harvest cactus apples using long tongs. Give a twist and pull; ripe fruit comes off easily. Collect in a metal or plastic pail. Transfer cactus apples by pouring small batches of several dozen fruits into a small pail.
After first wash ~ masses of tiny spines (glochids) will float to the surface.
3. Spray water onto the fruit, using a high-pressure nozzle, until a “whirlpool” forms inside your pail. This tumbles the fruits against each other, and knocks off the spines, which will float up to the surface of the water.
Pour off water and floating glochids after each rinse.
4. Pour off the water with the floating spines. Masses of tiny spines will be knocked off the fruits and float to the top. Discard the spine-filled water onto an area where people and pets don’t walk – water your yard plants! Repeat this rinsing/tumbling process three or four times until you no longer see spines floating on the surface after the water stops whirling.
Final rinse in a colander/pasta pot removes any lingering spines.
After first wash ~ masses of tiny spines (glochids) will float to the surface.
5. Final rinse – For extra assurance to remove any lingering spines, we pour the fruits into a pasta pot or colander for a final rinse.
6. Transfer small batches of cleaned apples into freezer bags, label, and freeze for later use throughout the year. During the freezing process, moisture inside the fruits’ cells expands, bursting cell walls to help release more juice upon thawing (cactus fruits are about 85% water).
Pierce frozen cactus fruits through the plastic bag to help release juice as the fruits thaw
7. When you are ready to make juice, remove a bag of frozen cactus apples, and poke holes right through the bag into the frozen fruits using an ice pick or narrow-bladed knife. This will pierce the skin of the fruits and release juice as the fruits thaw.
Put the bag of frozen cactus fruits in a colander with a weight on the bag (we use a tea kettle full of water), place the colander over a pot and collect the juice as the fruits thaw.
8. Place the bag with frozen fruits into a colander over a collecting pot, and place a weight on the bag to press out the juice as the fruits thaw. We use a tea pot full of water for weight. Then, walk away and wait until the fruits are completely thawed. The pot will collect the pure cactus juice as the fruits thaw. About 10-12 cactus fruits makes about one cup of pure juice. In our batch below, we extracted three cups of juice from 30 prickly pear fruits.
9. For one final assurance that no tiny glochids have made it through your gauntlet of spine abatement, you may filter your final juice through cheese cloth or a coffee filter into a clean pot.
Pour your liquid “Ruby Nectar” cactus juice into glasses and enjoy.
10. Pour your pure cactus juice into glasses and enjoy! Some people prefer to add a little agave nectar for a sweeter drink, but we just add some ice during summer months, and serve in wine glasses to showcase the beauty of the beverage. Once we accidentally made cactus “wine” when we left a batch in the refrigerator during an extended expedition out of the country, and my husband relished it. He likened it to red apple jack.
For a variation, mix prickly pear juice with equal parts of fresh lemonade, or add a little lime juice, some freshly grated ginger, and a dash of agave nectar. You may also want to indulge in a country-wide passion for prickly pear margaritas using your juice extract.
11. You may recycle the seed-filled pulp of the fruits (for compost, or to feed critters that eat fruit; desert tortoise are especially fond of the fruits), or use the pulp for other recipes. Be aware that the pulp will be filled with hard seeds, and separating the two takes time. This recipe is designed specifically for juice extraction; if you want to use the pulp for food recipes, follow the above tips through freezing. As the prickly pears begin to defrost, their skins will slip off easily. Slit each fruit in half lengthwise with a knife and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. It takes about 8 – 10 prickly pears to get 1 cup of fruit.
However you decide to use these bountiful gifts from the desert, enjoy their taste, their color, and their extraordinary health benefits (see my previous post, The Magic of Prickly Pear Cactus). Bon appetite!
Prickly Poppy
We have been trained, over generations of time, that whenever we move into an area, we are to remove the native plants growing on our new site and replace them with plants from wherever we were before, or at least with plants we are familiar with. The plants we introduce into our new setting are not necessarily the ones best adapted to that area, but are the ones that have been marketed to us as the industrial standards that are the “right” ones to use. These plants are invariably mass-produced, mass-marketed, and are therefore the plants that we see for sale all around us: available, cheap, and familiar.
If our new place does not support the plants we have been trained to want (due to climate or soils, for instance), we try to change the place. We remove the native plants (often considered “weeds”), take out the native soil, bring in new soil, install irrigation, and add pesticides and fertilizers so the introduced plants will be able to tolerate a climate they are not naturally adapted to survive.
What we end up with across America are the same plants, with the same look, no matter where we live. What differs is the amount of time and resources spent to keep those plants living in every conceivable climate to which they are subjected. This may achieve a certain aesthetic look, but it is not ecological in any way. Traditional landscape designs often isolate yards and gardens from the natural environment, then drain the surroundings of resources and add nothing back in return (except for tainting the whole setting with toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides).
Our best approach to landscaping is to select plants appropriate to our place, and not try to change our place to fit inappropriate plants. By selecting plants that have evolved with our region’s climate and soils, we eliminate the need to constantly add resources not supplied naturally by our climate. Plants native to an area evolved to grow and thrive in those local conditions, and do not need the place changed at all to survive. Our native plants need very little care or maintenance and need very little or no added water or soil amendments. We may be surprised to find how many songbirds are attracted to our native yard plantings, and pleased to realize that those songbirds keep pests under control, eliminating the need for pesticides.
Paperbag Bush Flowers
Some of the benefits of landscaping with natives, or “naturescaping”, include low maintenance, little or no watering after establishment, no need for chemical pesticides or fertilizers, less cost to maintain, healthier home-site (no leaching of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers into groundwater), enhanced property value, and providing habitat for songbirds whose populations are dropping dramatically every year due to loss of habitat.
Let’s change our way of thinking: pick the plant that fits the place, and not change the place to fit the plant. Native plants take care of themselves because they evolved to grow naturally in your own back yard. Desert native plants, in particular, thrive in one of the harshest environments on our planet, and should be the first landscape plants invited back into our southwest desert yards.
Inviting Native Plants into Your Yard
Tips on Planting Native Plants
Tips on Watering Native Plants
