Pears are getting ripe very late in 2019. Douglas, Duchess d’ Angoulme, and improved kieffer are still mostly on the trees. Anyone elses pears getting ripe late this year?
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It seems to me that things are running differently from last year, and last year was different too.
As I understand it the weather of the current year actually has less influence on a crop than the weather of the previous year. Once you try to factor the both of them you can get into something of a mess. So I don’t know what to think.
But short answer? Yes, I think things are later this year. Certainly has been true of my apples.
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No, not in Kentucky. By mid August I had picked any apples, that the bears hadn’t eaten. A tree (not Macintosh we’ll call it) I always harvest in late September or early October…all the apples “disappeared” one night in early August…20 foot tall or more tree.
I picked Frostbite in early August…it wasn’t actually ripe, but it was on the sweet side regardless. Then the tree died from drought in early September. G11 or G41 I dont’ recall which from memory.
So, things were definitely ahead of the usual ripening times here. Picked the last of my mom’s Winesaps that I could reach a week ago…not colored hardly, but ripe. Most hit the ground in mid September. The ones left kept growing despite the super dry fall.
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Are those your latest ripening pears most years? I’m interested in exploring options for especially late ripening pear varieties. Anyone else have recommendations?
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I can tell you ars grin have some particularly late types available and some early ones as well. I was shocked when i first researched this to learn some pears ripen in June
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@Fusion_power is looking to answer these questions we discussed many times and many years ago on earliest pears and the latest ripening pears. I think the last time was this thread from 5 years ago. He is planning his pear orchard, and i want to help him do it better than we did going the route of the school of hard knocks. I will help him out with a few late ones like Korean Giant, Duchess D’ Angoulme, kieffer, and Grand Champion. I already suggested admire joanette is one of the few early ones that is decent. He still may learn the hard way about some things as most of us do. He has planted around 100 pear trees already. Lets face it the sooner he starts having all mature pears the sooner he will learn more. Fireblight , and everything else known to happen in a pear orchard like cicada taught me some things. My Dad once roped a steer and the rope wrapped around him. That steer drug him 1/2 mile at top speed. My Dad learned a good dragging and a mouth full of foxtail is the best teacher. He never looked more satisfied than when he ate that beef. My dad literally had his pants torn off by our mean hogs. A big sow grabbed him by the leg and he ripped his pants off getting away from them. They get you down and they can be very dangerous. Some lessons i learned through other people as well.
Clark, I have 5 year old trees of Korean Giant, Duchess d’Angouleme, Kieffer, Improved Kieffer, Lucky’s Very Late, and several others. My goal is to have ripe pears for at least 9 months of the year. To do this, I need earlier ripening varieties in the June to early July timeframe. Progres, Pautalia, Ecmianka, Bella di Giugno, Beurré Giffard, and Doyenne de Juillet are all listed as maturing in June. Iwate Yamanashi, Johantorp, Le Lectier, Madame Verte, Namshi Pt, Santa Claus, Scipiona, Success de la, Meilleraye, Yokogoshi, Doyenne dAlecon, and Homony are all listed as maturing ready to harvest in late October, November, and early December. I have references from a website in Europe to other varieties that are either very early or very late maturing.
While filling in the early/late maturity gaps, I want to maintain focus on good flavored and fire blight tolerant varieties. This is difficult to do as most of the earliest and latest maturing varieties either have poor flavor or have no disease tolerance.
Amire Joannet is July 10th to 20th for maturity. It is on my radar, but not yet high enough to be worth looking for scions.
I’m posting an updated Pear.Pollination.xlsx spreadsheet in the pear traits thread. Pull a copy if you want to see what I have. Keep in mind it is a HUGE work in progress with a ton more to be done adding varieties and eliminating duplicates from the current data.
What is new in this version? I added ARS data for Julian date of full bloom and Julian date of harvest. I added a “maturity” tab which has harvest data from 2 sources. I removed a bunch of duplicates though there are still a ton in the list.
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