DIYbanter - View Single Post

gonjah[_3_]

On 6/28/2013 3:39 PM, wrote:
On 28 Jun 2013 16:20:54 GMT, KenK wrote:

I live in the southwest desert and am having a cactus problem.

I have a very large 9 - 10 foot cactus in my yard - prickly pear I think it
is, the one with the rosy red large edible buds - which lost about half the
plant through a breakoff.

Anyway, I'm slowly cleaning up the corpse. This variety of cactus has very
fine thorns, like fur, but very very irritating. I hate to use good fabric
gloves to handle the pieces for fear the thorns will probably imbed
themselves and make the gloves unusable for anything else. True? I think
the thorns will go right through latex gloves. Any convenient way to handle
the large pieces other than piercing and moving them with a big knife or
screwdriver? Not very convenient.

Next question - a way to get the thorns out of my skin? They are so small
they are almost invisible to my aging eyes to get out with tweezers.

TIA

We have a lot of people here in florida who planted those little
cactus you get in a jar and now they are over the house. They just go
nuts here. Sun and water
If you don't have a machine to get rid of them people break them up
with chains behind the truck and use a pitch fork to handle the stuff
that breaks off. The "hort" pickup guys hate them.

We got rid of ours with long handle lopping shears and a pitch fork. We
put the cactus in heavy duty boxes, threw some in the trash, and gave
some to a friend. Good riddance. The prickly pear was almost as tall as
our house. Pretty but a bitch to keep maintained.