Foot preferences depend on locality and availability of food items. In general, tortoises in California feed on annual wildflowers, such as blazing stars, lupines, loco weeds, lotus, Indian wheat, forget me-nots, desert dandelions, gilias, phacelias, coreopsis, alkali goldfields and many other species. They also eat annual and perennial grasses and fresh pads and buds of some species of cactus. After the annual wildflowers have dried in spring, tortoises will eat the dried plants throughout late spring and into summer and fall. Consumption of dried plant material is somewhat dependent on the tortoise's state of hydration, and whether the tortoise has recently drunk water.
Tortoises drink free water where it collects in pools near rocks or in depressions.
Tortoises will dig depressions to collect the water and such depressions can often be seen on areas of desert pavement. Tortoises can store water in the bladder, where it can be reabsorbed. Bladder water varies in color from clear and colorless to dark brown. In the wild, females usually lay one or more clutches of 1 to 14 eggs between mid-April and the first week of July. The size of the clutch depends on the size of the female, with small females producing smaller clutches than the larger females.