@speedster1
I suspect you have harrow delight on the tree by now though it could be next year. How are they working out for you?
I had a few blooms this year but no fruit set. I had a good set on some of my Asian pears but they unfortunately were vandalized by deer this year. I did get to sample Yonashi, Yongi, Korean Giant. All of which I enjoyed a lot. NExt step is to rethink my deer protection.
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Here, deer donāt eat green fruit and at some sites some years arenāt even very interested in ripe fruit. Usually it is squirrels that take green pears, apples or peaches- when dear eat them around here it is always incidental to eating foliage- collateral damage. Ripe fruit they sometimes like, but not always.
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Sure do love the harrow sweet harvest in 2019! Harrow delight Harrow Delight Pear - #15 by mamuang was also very good this year. The crop of harrow sweet was a couple of gallons because they are a very small pear. ! Sugar sweet delicious with true pear flavor! Im truly very blessed with such incredibly good fortune!
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Do you thin them much? Mine vary in size more than yours with some really big ones. If I thin thoroughly they are consistently pretty good sized. Of course, the main thing is just having the sugar. Glad they are performing for you. They are pretty much the only successful pear in my orchard this year.
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@alan
I did not thin much and i should hsve. They would likely do better on BET instead of the typical rootstock. Great pears @alan i appreciate all your efforts bringing attention to this pear! Had it not been for you this pear might have dissapeared
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I suspect they are being grown in Canada. Here pears are mostly grown in the west and they have ways to keep Bartlett salable for a very long time.
Iām actually surprised that Hudson Valley growers havenāt taken to Harsweet just based on their reliability and psyla resistance. Crazy.
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At any rate @alan your very modest but i learned a great deal about pear growing and fruit growing in general from you, @Lucky_P, @scottfsmith, and @fruitnut to name a few. Pears were in this country in trouble but now i have seen renewed interest in growing them, eating them etc. . There are people in my area making alcohol from pears as we speak. Hopefully he is making perry. Much of the renewed interest is because people in less than hospitable climates heard about pears that would grow in their area from you on the old gardenweb and now on growingfruit. We all play a part in that even now but no doubt the future of pears is in its infancy and will hopefully soon catch up to apples in the United States as impossible as that sounds. @applenut has done incredible work spreading apple growing into less fortunate countries and i would love to see that eventually done with pears.
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I wish it were too cold here for Callery rootstocks. These wild Callery trees are taking over here in Ohio. The nurseries are not allowed to sell certain ornamental pear trees because of the issue of the seedlings being so prolific and invasive they once thought were sterile.
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@MikeC
Its not to cold there they adapt and will adapt to his environment also. It was to cold in Kansas and they only lived 20 years supposedly and i have seen very old trees and they thrive in cold winters -20f.
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Itās funny how you can spread āinformationā based on clear anecdotal observations or the information provided by the researchers and be equally wrong.
However, when you observe something completely contradictory of the literature itās probably safe to say the literature is at least partially wrong.
If rootsocks are seedling based and not clonal, there is going to be a tremendous amount of variability. Maybe that has something to do with this particular contradiction.
Those ornamental pears are so common place and produce so many seeds that we may be breeding strains that flourish in an increasingly wide range of habitat.
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@alan
Yes thats exactly the case so much so that im betting some callery are on 100+ generations of wild breeding by now. This thread demonstrates the unusual genetic diversity when you see the callery fruit Callery pear as rootstock?. Look at this thread and you decide Favor for a friend - Top working Pears!. This thread gives you an idea of how they are adapting Wild callery pear rootstocks. We had some wild callery crosses we found growing in standing water Wild callery pear rootstocks. I used those seedlings in areas that sometimes have standing water. They are at times crossed with BET seedlings or other pears. Imagine harrow delight grafted on wild callery crosses they are an excellent pear tree!
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You are becoming the Luther Burbank of low input midwestern pear production.
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I am so excited!!! I have new trees of both harrow sweet and delight!!! Im up to 10 varieties and more on the way!!!
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@PaulinKansas6b you wont regret planting those but the crops are not high quantity but rather high quality in the case of harrow sweet. Harrow delight is earlier and far more productive.
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Here Harrow Sweet is just as productive and they are the two most productive pears I grow, by far. Especially when weighing in relative maintenance required.
Bosc, Seckel and several other pears completely defoliated early this year after bearing light crops. Probably be light next year as a result.
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@alan my trees are still young perhaps harrow sweet fruit will become larger as they mature more. The trees are not large though they do fruit heavily.
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More precocious usually equals less vigorous. Pull off blossoms if you want bigger trees or thin early and aggressively.
Such trees will still expend more energy than others on next seasonās flower buds, which form the growing season before they blossom. The most vigorous growth comes from juvenile wood.
It creates a level of dwarfing no matter what you do. In pears it may reduce the risk of fire blight.
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@alan
What i normally do is take the pears while i can get them and just pull off flower buds the first 2 years. I made a mistake with that in the case of harrow sweet. In Kansas we get late freezes which sometimes compromise blossoms. In harrow sweets case it blooms late so its had less time to grow because less flower buds get nipped and it produces faster in the first place. Harrow sweet may be a pear that as you mentioned i may need to rethink my management style with. Thank you for the honest recommendations Alan as always i respect your orchard management techniques but try and adapt them to Kansas. This year as an example due to heavy fruit set and extreme storms many of my pears suffered severe branch damage. In your area because no such conditions exist your forced to prune to replicate what we have naturally that stimulates vigor occasionally. This winter i will prune off damaged areas. We typically have blossoms frozen on all other pears which gives the pear trees a chance to get larger and put out more vegetative growth. Management is different and yet we still have the same goals. Im forced to grow full sized trees so most of my crop is above the deer browsing range. Im sure most people want dwarf trees. Land is not a premium in Kansas at $3,000 per acre whereas in some locations land might be 10 000 - 40,000 per acre so we can experiment more. I will grow harrow on BET rootstock next like an asian pear.
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