@39thparallel and i were taking it pretty easy but stayed after it so we just ran a few hours and pressed 24 gallons that day roughly. We started around 1 and finished by 4 or 5. We took time to eat in there. It was yielding right around 12 gallons a batch. Some apples are dryer than others so dont be surprised if your numbers are slightly different.
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That’s an awesome photo!. I will probably try making a pure perry cider again, but as you said it ssems hard to do without amendments. I have yet to see a good crop off the perry pears I planted. I will see what high Acid pears @clarkinks can supply. I need to take a PH reading off St Nickolas next year. It seemed very sharp.
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We will figure it out. Between the tow of us, we have an insane amount of pears to experiment with.
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Yes we have an excess and we can always change some varities over to whatever we want or need.
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Well, I have only pressed pears a couple times, but I am sure you do not want them to be completely ripe, ready for eating fresh out of hand. They are too soft at that point, and will turn to a puree or mush when grinding, and it will squeeze between the holes in the mesh strainer, slowing the process considerably, and making pressing difficult. To prevent that problem, I think you need to grind the pears when still hard, before they would be ready for fresh eating.
With perry pears, most are probably not best for fresh eating anyway, right?
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Yes some pears will be better for that than others for sure. Some as mentioned like Saint Nicolas may be just the thing for perry. Mostly i eat overdone sweet boring pears or course tasteless pears when trying something new. Saint Nicolas pear is not that. It hinted at offending my taste buds it was so tart. It was a little like a lemon or quince and yet i took another bite as if to clarify what i tasted. It was not what i expected in a pear. I’ m not sure it’s perfect for perry but it could be blended with others i think to be incredible. It has merit for many things because that flavor is rare in the pear world. The very rare Saint Nicolas pear
In my efforts to find perry pears for my Zone 3/4 location, I Bench-grafted a few this year, but with limited success. I have a neighbor a couple doors downstream with Patten, and Ure pear trees, and he and I partnered up to make 220 bench grafts this year (200 apple, 20 pear).
He had no luck with his pear tree grafts (0/10), and I was only a little better (7/14). I won’t speculate on the reasons for our failures, but only suggest they are more difficult than apples. Anyway, the I did manage to have success with Romania, Butt, Henre Huffcap, Bella di Guigno, from Renaissance Orchards: SCIONWOOD STORE – Online Store
But I was most excited to have success with 3 Brandy pear bench-grafts. Brandy was hard to find, but I got some from Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery, who seems to be the source for the nurseries selling Brandy trees. Here is a description of Brandy from Cummin’s:
A mid-season heirloom pear with medium acid and low tannin.
Brandy is a compact tree, smaller and with a tighter crotch angle than most perry trees. This cultivar is vigorous, sturdy, and precocious, producing in two to three years. It tends to biennialism, and Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery reports that it exhibits greater blight tolerance, if not resistance, than most perry varieties. USDA data suggests that Brandy is also highly resistant to scab, mildew, and rust. This pear is used exclusively for cider; it is not suitible for fresh eating.
Brandy is among a number of perry pears that are named after alcoholic spirits, possibly to indicate their potency. Among the cider varieties that were used in England in the 1800s, Brandy has remained a popular choice for perry makers ever since. This particular tree hails from West Gloucestershire. Its small turbinate (sharply decreasing cone shaped) fruit yields a dark, aromatic, mild vintage. It is classified as medium sharp and should be milled within four weeks after harvest. (From Brooks and Olmo: juice acidity 0.44, tannins 0.12, specific gravity 1.069.)
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@JohnnyRoger; for your zone 3 try Kerr, a fantastic crab apple that while not red fleshed drops ruby red juice that tastes like cranberry. Franklin cider crab apple also should be hardy, a veritable tannins, acids, and sugars bomb. It could be one of the most hardy bitter sharp apples around.
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I usually press pears when they are not quite ripe. I get a similar yield as apples. I have a source for perry pears, but find crabapples added to standard pears can make a very good perry. You need a good percentage of crabapples that make you pucker. Here’s a shot of perry pressing this year. Only did a small batch because I had so many grapes to press and ferment.
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Both of your suggested varieties, Kerr, and Franklin Cider, are excellent. Everybody in the area raves about Kerr, and a local nurseryman says it is his favorite. The Franklin Cider is also one that is growing well for me here. I assume you are talking about the Patented Franklin sold by Cummin’s Nursery? I bought two of them on B-118, and I transplanted one 3 year old tree this spring to the cemetery by my wife’s gravesite. The soil at my house (about six miles away), is high PH, about 8.3, and there at the cemetery it has some hard clay soils, so I was rather worried the transplant would fail. It is the end of the year now, though, and it survived just fine. I have found through trials that the B-118 rootstock is what is best for my location.
There are no other apple trees allowed at the cemetery (so as not to attract too many deer), and so next spring I will be grafting another variety onto the tree at the cemetery for polination.
So, yes, I have been trialing rootstock and apple varieties a few years, since 2019, and next year plan on planting the first trees in my hobby orchard. After updating my list of varieties, I see five which are only on my older exhisting trees, and not on a root–likely because of a graft failure. The rest are on 1, 2, and 3 year old bench grafts planted a foot apart in my fenced garden. Here is a list of the varieties I currently have:
2022 FALL LIST OF APPLE & PEAR VARIETIES.doc (29 KB)
My plan is to have an orchard of about 40 trees, but having about 80 to 100 varieties on those trees.
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That’s my orchard in a nutshell.
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Included in that forty tree hobby orchard number, I have two peach, Reliance and Contender, two plums, Toka and Waneta, and four to six pear tree. The peaches are semi-dwarf, from Stark Bros, not sure which rootstock (I forget, and can’t find the notes). The plums I bench-grafted onto Krymysk 1 dwarf roots, and the pears are on both OHxF97 rootstock, and Pyrus ussuriensis rootstock. For apples, I have 15 varieties on Baccata, 11 varieties on Ranetka, and the rest all on B-118, which seems to thrive in my gravelly, high PH soil.
Presently, I have about 100 each, one and two year old trees, and a dozen or so three year olds. And so next year, I will begin transplanting from the garden bed (where they are currently one foot apart), into the orchard–which is not yet prepared. Hard finding help these days–even when paying cash!
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I only have one acre to play with, and a good chunk is forested 
Plus I always like to see what else I can get growing well here, last count it was over 70 distinct varieties of edible things sucking up sun here and there. i need to do a new inventory…
@JohnnyRoger; I see you have Prairie Magic! That’s one of my favorite apples ever. I recognize a bunch of the usual suspects you find up here in Alaska. The biggest difference is that you can get away with later season apples, anything that ripens even in the first week of October is pushing their luck.
Speaking of luck, how is Kingston Black doing on your chilly neck of the woods? When does it ripen compared to the Franklin crab apples?
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I too only have about an acre for planting my hobby orchard, but that is enough for my needs. I have a neighbor only a couple houses downstream who has over a hundred fruit trees, and he and I have worked together to graft some trees. When I stopped by and introduced myself, I was hoping the neighbor had a wealth of knowledge and would be able to give me some help and advice. It turns out, however, that I have more knowledge (and grafting skills) than he. In fact, he really didn’t seem to know what he was doing at all, besides digging holes and placing the trees in the ground. Since that time, we have become friends and I helped him to bench-graft 100 apple and 20 pear trees, this past Spring (plus about the same number for myself)…
Anyway, to try and answer your questions, I had two Kingston Black which seemed to be “thriving” on G-890 in large pots for a couple years, but when we got a Spring snow and cold snap, in 2020, they both died, along with a Bulmer’s Norman (also on G-890). The three Hewes Crab trees growing on EMLA 106 in pots beside them survived just fine. Since the Kingston Black had started off so well, I decided this year to bench-graft another onto B-118 to trial…and it did okay in the garden bed, but growth was slow compared with many others…and so it will be a few years before I can give a better report.
The Franklin crab wanted to produce fruit early, but I haven’t allowed it to yet. I transplanted it to the cemetery this Spring, and when it blossomed I removed the flowers Next year, I plan on grafting some other varieties onto it, so it will be self-pollinating. (There are no other apple trees allowed, because they do not want too many attract deer.)
One variety that might interest you is the heirloom Hewe’s Virginia Crab. I grafted a small scion onto the branch of a large exhisting tree, and the following year I got a cluster of five apples–which ripened about the end of September, I think–from the branch it grew. Super tasty too! Have made a lot of Hewe’s crab grafts since, and next year I should be seeing more of that fruit, plus a few others I also grafted onto older exhisting trees for trials.
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Like the flavor of harrison. This is one @39thparallel grows. It was not overly productive yet.
Its an old crabapple that was lost and rediscovered at a cider mill in 1976.
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What you say about Kingston Black having a heart attack during a late spring frost bodes really badly for it here. One feature of my weather that can murder the hardiest of trees is a January meltdown. We can spend a whole week in the mid 40’s, sun shining, to be followed by sub zero temperatures the next week. Anything that is stupid enough to even think about waking up just a bit (shedding winter hardiness) dies.
I wanted to trial the Franklin cider crab because of reports that it doesn’t mind late frosts. I think it was the winter/spring of 2012, a frost pretty much destroyed apple production in the entire up state NY region and yet the mother tree didn’t care and went on to have a full crop. The only issue seem to be that early October may be too close for comfort but so far so good.
Virginia Hewes has been on my short list of trees to plant but so far I haven’t come across any for either sale or to borrow a branch from for grafting. I should bump it up on my priority list of things to do…
I have Hewe’s / Virginia Crab on M.111, it’s vigorous and precocious. The coloring on mine seems quite extensive leaving me wondering if I have Red Hewe’s Crab, a seedling of Hewe’s / Virginia. It has excellent flavor so regardless it’s a keeper. It has done well here in my Z4a in Upstate NY. I just checked my records, and my trees came from 39th Parallel in 2018 and 2019. I’d be interested in hearing if Mike’s trees color up as much as mine, perhaps it’s something to do with my climate / location.
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That’s interesting. When do they ripen there? They look totally different here. They only get a red blush and turn almost translucent when overripe. Your picture looks more like an old USDA watercolor. here is what they look like In Kansas Mid-August.
They are a great cider apple but, the size make them a little labor intensive to harvest.
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Very interesting ! Here’s a photo taken 8/24, they look more like yours. The other photo was taken 10/12. By mid-September Hewe’s / Virginia Crab has taken on the deep red color here. Flavor is great, even before they’re ripe. The flesh gets translucent on the overripe here as well.
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The Summer heat here does odd things to some apple varieties. I think @scottfsmith had commented that the harvest period For Hewes documented in old texts was not consistent with what he saw.
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