A rancher-woman's work is never done

I saddled up Hank yesterday and gave him a job to do - help me find patches of a particularly evil cactus variety that I had decided to eradicate from the ranch. From high atop his back, the cacti would be easy to spot, and I would return later with a shovel and the Ranger to start making a dent in this chore.

On cactiguide.com (yes, Virginia, there is a website for everything), I learned that this stuff is called Grusonia clavata, also known more appropriately as Dagger Cholla (that’s choy-yuh, not chole-la for the uninitiated...one of the first lessons I learned when I moved to New Mexico was to never say any word I’d never seen before until I heard a native say it...and yes, this was learned the hard way...I lived off Calle Nortena in Bernalillo county). I also learned that this species had an encounterability rating of “rare.” Clearly, the authors of cactiguide.com had never been to the 7MSN.

Now why would a reasonably sane person attempt to eradicate cacti from the desert? Heaven forbid one of my horse's or burro's velvety muzzles should accidentally bump into one, and we all know the grass is always greener at the base of the cacti, so the likelihood of said accident is extremely high, particularly when one of the muzzles in question belongs to I-never-met-anything-I-didn’t-want-to-investigate-further Lyle. In addition, one less patch of cacti is one less painful place I might get dumped when Hank or Lyle get western on me.

So today, when it was too windy to enjoy riding, I started to dig up Dagger Cholla. Mercifully, it’s isolated to a few spots on the ranch, unlike last year’s locoweed (a subject for another time). Of course the boys had to try to help me - Lyle provides all the entertainment one could possibly need to take one’s mind off the tedium of dig-pick-toss, repeat.

Everybody comes out to investigate...with Lyle leading the way, of course

Hmm...maybe this handle is edible.

Hmm...maybe there's a carrot in one of these pockets.