Any blooms by chance? This is a really good pear on a good year. Hard to pick, dont keep etc. But the best flavor of any pear i have had! Do you still sell some of these trees if someone is looking for a tree? @39thparallel
Are you grafting some of my small yellow pear and crabapples for your nursery next year?
Frequently i get requests for these trees and one way or the other people got the scions or trees they needed this year. Im not always going to be able to cut pear or apple scion wood for everyone who requests these types. Every year i get requests.
The small yellow pear is very high quality but not prior to ripening is not. I use my thumb and push into the pear and wgen its ripe you can physically feel the give in the neck. The green gives way to a slightly liggter greenish yellow color. A few pears ripen and drop before others not due to insect damage just the nature of the tree. The tilt test is effective but not until the last minute. Insects that like sugar begin to arrive such as wasps and beetles. There are so many i eat one and look at the seeds color. In addition to all that it ripens early summer so i use other easy to pick pears as indicators.
I may not always be around so in case im not remember share this pear for free when you can as i did. Once you taste it you will know why i said that if its suitable to your climate im confident it will be your highest quality pear. The first couple of years it produces fruit they will not be its best quality in fact in the case of my first tree they were awful. Normally i would have top worked it but got busy and didnt and was also curious about it. The tree is thorny when its young but as it ages it wont be. If all that was not unique and strange enough its final unusual trick it can do is bloom a second time and still ripen very tiny fruit before fall. Thats useful on years like this where the crop is scarce due to a killing freeze of the blooms. Im on the verge of some huge break throughs with pears and apples. If im unable to complete my work with this pear i put it in the hands of others on this forum. I always gave it away free of charge because these unique features make the genetics of this pear very important to the future of all people. Some things in life go beyond ourselves and the seed crosses of pears and apples im working on will be incredibly important for the future of everyone.
@clarkinks
Glad you mentioned that the fruit could disappoint at first. Knowing this would stop me from removing the tree after a year or two of fruiting. It looks like this variety needs a chance to produce better fruit as the tree grows to maturity.
Yeah, I’d love a deer fence, but with the hills and blackberries, I’d have to deal with a gates and maintaining fence line. Not to mention the expense.
@mamuang
Correct and then they have off years as well. Its a very tempermental pear but the taste of one is incredible and something you must experience for yourself. @BG1977
I train my deer , rabbits etc. with BET and callery rootstocks planted out all over. They get very thorny and the deer rub them some but in general are not interested in thorny rootstocks. The animals know im here and eat windfalls but in general do not mess with my trees with the occasional exception. Then when the rootstocks are larger i graft them over higher up. Rabbits hate my Bet & callery usually! See the rabbit tracks in the snow walking past my rootstocks
@murky
In many parts of the world people plant fences made out of thorny trees maybe something like those pictured above. Lions will not even cross thorny brush. Nothing likes thorns unless it has an itch.
Wow, those are wicked. I have snow tires on my mower for traction. They have great tread and soft compound, but only 2-ply. I get occasional punctures from stuff not nearly so evil looking as that. Impressive.
My disdain cycles through different pests. Dear, slugs, rabbits, voles but I think I’m rounding back to deer. I’ve only had vole and rabbit trouble when we got a bunch of snow, which isn’t supposed to be common here.
The neighbors ducks cleaned up the slugs after the 1st year.
I have to protect everything from deer and my vigilance has waned as I’ve seen less damage. I need to pick up my game again.
@murky
Typically i graft pears over when they are a few feet tall but some are hard to graft and take an extra year or two. These pears are like a childhood bully by the 2nd or 3rd year everything remembers them well having been stuck or scratched by them. The deer and rabbits are not interested in these pears anymore. When i graft them over i wait until they are taller in heavy deer traffic areas. These are pictures of a difficult to graft one that is now clara frijs. Another tip is i use the old branches for mulch to retain water and to keep the deer and rabbits from walking over to the trunk of the tree. Once the trunk barks up the war is won. A tree like this is carefree to grow and fruits just as fast here due to the roots and faster growth of these rootstocks. They are wet soil, drought , wind, poor soil tolerant as well.
Those root stocks look like one of our pomegranate bushes. Great motivation to get the rose pruning gloves that I bought, they protect the arms as well.
I still don’t see any spurring of buds. Maybe it’s the soil over there. I finally after 10-years have spurs all over a peach, a ‘Saturn’. It’s just loaded. I’m guessing there isn’t any/enough phosphorous in the soil. ph is 7.0 anywhere I turn. that’s dense clay that starts off good but as the hillside steepens- it becomes muck. Pecan trees don’t mind it.
Have had lots of stonefruits in that area of decent but heavy clay that drains and none of them wanted to produce fruit. It’s gotta be phosphorous doesn’t it? @alan
Finally I decided to not prune that Saturn peach on peach seedling for several years to see if that would help and it appears it could have (?)
I think it would be very difficult to stop a tree from fruiting by depriving it of P. The mychorizal relationships in any soil that has been inhabited by trees would render that highly unlikely.
In spite of all my years of fruit growing I’m inexpert at matching nutrient deficiencies with the failure to produce fruit, it just doesn’t tend to happen around here in my experience. I’ve had excessively vigorous trees take overlong to mature (fruit) but that’s another issue although it is related to nutrition.
If I suspect a nutrient deficiency I would first do a soil test and in a case like yours, spring for the money to do some leaf analysis if the soil didn’t provide a clear clue. I’ve never done leaf analysis, but have recommended it when a client just doesn’t believe that their trees are too juiced and too close together and are suspicious I’m doing something wrong.
The rich sometimes want their cake, eat it, and have a thousand more cakes in the freezer, just in case.
That tree looks very healthy and the ground must be fertile enough with that growth. A pear will take as long as a pear takes. Seems to have enough semi horizontal branching to make some spurs at some point. My soil is not as overly fertile so I haven’t fought that vertical growth as much on most of my trees.
I can tell by looking at that pear you will get some pears next year or the year after. Dont prune it back and get future fruit buds, many will be close to the tips (future pears in 3 years) Not on this years growth or last years but 3 years ago the first pears will set soon. I’m excited for you, is that your only coming into production?
I think I won’t “spur” to the soil test event anytime soon. I’m going to start with the neighbor across the road that farmed this land. I’ll see what he got to say.
Clark I cut my Harrow Sweet back to two buds this Spring while sending scionwood out. I put that on a 1/2" rootstock 2-years ago when I made the mistake of buying large rootstock which equated to 10x the work. My trees are growing like gangbusters though. That caliper with roots that came along really is pushing tons of growth (OHxF 87). So that Harrow Shot up with the thickest shoots of anything pear-wise. Put 5’ on and lots of great branching on its own. I’m impressed with it. It what you and @alan have been saying about it since I remember stepping into this forum with ‘green’ shoes definitely w/o bells; Yep, I was a greenhorn 5-years ago.
@Barkslip many years ago now @alan told me about harrow sweet before the website growingfruit was started by Scott. It"s likely Alan did more to spread the word about that pear than anyone else. @scottfsmith@Olpea@fruitnut deserve a medal for what they did to improve fruit growing by amateur fruit hobbyist. My goal has always been more focused on pears than anything else. I believe we can make the world a better place with pears. They are a more long term fruit crop that are low spray, low fertilizer than any other i know of. Think about farming and crop rotation in terms of 50 - 100 year blocks. The pears napoleans army planted im amazed when i read some are still alive. Think about how much soil is lost and damage done by erosion and the fact that a pear orchard stops soil damage. In my area pears produce an amazing crop. You will never regret planting your pear orchard. Harrow delight does fantastic here as well. I know i will leave the world much better than i found it. Its a satisfying feeling to know lots of peoples lives will be better because of what we did. We all likely start out improving our fruit growing skills but in the end we are blessed with abundance and just pay it forward to help the next generation of fruit growers get started.
