During droughty years there is at least one frequent source of nutrition. The honey mesquite tree (Prosopis glandulosa), whose seeds are found in Bosque River Native forage camps. The trees can be controlled by fire to maintain a savannah-like population. Individual, fire-trained trees grow straight, without those draggy limbs, to around twenty-five feet tall, and can live for up to 200 years. The drought-tolerant mesquite is often a reliable crop when the other Native foods trees failed to produce, and oddly the more intense the drought year, the heavier the yield. The mesquite produces tasty, fleshy pods, with 39% protein 39% protein, that surround the beans. The flavor is described as a cross between honey and pecans. A single tree can produce 20 pounds of pods if they are allowed to reach maturity. Spanish chroniclers report that the flowers were collected and roasted in balls, and the green pods were used to produce a sweet syrup that was dried as candy. An amber-colored gum was harvested from incisions made in the bark that provided antiseptic gum drops. The most important characteristic of mesquite is that the pods and the meal ground from the pods, can survive storage through the winter. The tan to purplish pods were gathered in the fall. Since he sweetness and yield vary enormously from tree to tree, it’s almost certain that leading families claimed the fruit from heritage trees for generations. European observers noticed that because the process was so sticky, the roasted pods were were pounded in cottonwood mortars rather than ground on metates, and the even more nutritious beans were removed and processed separately. The meal was then mixed with bone marrow and cooked as a porridge, boiled as “mezquitatole,” or baked as a long-lasting flatbread. The Apaches fermented the sugary meal and water into beer.