Prickly Pear Ca​ctus Syrup

In 2006, looking for a place to store our sailboat, we purchased some Sonoran desert land near Lake Roosevelt, North of Phoenix. It was overrun with prickly pear. One of the local cowboys, (yes cowboys!), mentioned he could cut it all down and burn it for a small fee. The prickly's were in their spring "Rose of Texas" flowering stage and we just didn't have the heart to cut them down. In the late summer, monsoon season in Arizona came the prickly's developed massive red fruit. We started collecting them and reading up on their uses. Wow, did we learn a lot, and from what we learned we decided to go into the prickly pear business. In the ten years since, we have refined our techniques and skills so that today, we now think we have the finest prickly pear products in the West. We are Anne Marie and Chris Hansel. She does the cooking, and I do the picking. Living on a small ranch in a place so beautiful, it is almost impossible to describe. You just have to see it.

Over the last decade we have traveled around the southwest doing art and crafts festivals selling our prickly pear and having great success in doing so. We have finally reached a point where we have stocked our inventory and wish to sell on-line. Below are some of places we have done shows over the years.

• States visited
• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• New Mexico
• Pennsylvania