In my very limited experience, medlar fruit, like serviceberries, has been completely ruined by some kind of cedar rust every year, but if that’s not an issue in your area it may be a fruit that’s very easy to grow no-spray.
Hidden Springs Nursery, which I think must be in an area with plenty of red-cedars, sells medlars and says they have done well in their area (and I think they grow very low-input organically). I’ve been very happy with the other things I’ve bought from them. Some of their things haven’t been fairly small, but they seemed to be priced very fairly, and everything I got from them was healthy and grew well, and I appreciate that they’re growing organically.
How do y’all prefer to blet these? A few came off in my hand the other day, so they’re inside now, but definitely not ready. We haven’t had a hard frost either. Should I throw them in the freezer for a night to jump-start things?
Just wait, the fact that they need to go through freezing period is a myth. If I remember correctly medlar originates from Iran (and the surrounding countries) which get barely any frost or possibly no frost at all. When the time comes it will blet, usually sometimes in November in my zone 7A and there are times when i don’t get first frosts till December.
My Medlar has about a dozen fruit still hanging. Given that we are expecting snow I will likely go pick them tomorrow when I get home from work…
I remember them being ok, but even though I have the “giant” variety they are still barely ping-pong ball sized. Slightly larger than my poncirus fruit this year.
I planted 3 medlar trees this year. I plan on taking a bit of scionwood and grafting onto wild crabapples next spring. I’ve heard it might be possible to do that. Guess I’ll find out!
A friend of mine told me that he has collected fruit from the entire Corvallis USDA collection to bet and sample them all…it will be interesting to hear his rankings.
I grew four varieties they were all a little different but overall more similar than different, not sure there is much of a reason to pick one over the other besides size.
They got really bad quince rust (probably the same thing you got Eric) plus they were not that unique in flavor (like low-sugar applesauce) so I took them out some time ago.
Just making an update based on my previous comment about planning to graft medlar to wild crabapples.
I grafted some Puciu Mol medlar scions onto a couple wild crabapples last spring, as well as some wild hawthorns.
The type of hawthorns I have here are all fairly small trees with skinny trunks. They ended up getting hit really hard by the 17 year cicadas that emerged here last year, so those all failed due to the hawthorn trunks being torn apart.
The grafts on crapapple did really well, though. One of the crabapples that I grafted to was a decent size, healthy tree with a few trunks. I grafted high, around 6 ft, to keep the scions out of deer browse range (probably not that necessary in hindsight). Those grafts started to push buds faster than any of the other grafts I did last year, including apple on apple, apple on crabapple, pear, mulberry, plum.
I’ll include a couple pics from last fall to show how well they grew. The graft unions feel pretty sturdy and look pretty good after winter. They grew pretty vigorously vertical, as medlars seem to do. I will prune them down soon to try and get them to push out some lower branches. Oddly enough, the one scion in the pictures that is dead was actually a Wickson crabapple that I tried grafting to that tree as well.
Jesse, did your friend ever share their thoughts? I’ve noticed enough variation to be of the opinion that quality varies from very good to total trash depending on the variety. I’m very much not in the “all medlars taste about the same” camp.
Unfortunately, no. A few of them held for a couple years but eventually became weak and brittle at the graft union and broke, likely due to delayed incompatibility. I’d like to try pear at some point as I’ve heard they can work on those. Quince and hawthorn work well.
I’ve heard some recommend to graft low on hawthorn and then bury the union to get the medlar to root. I wonder if that would work with crabapples as well since they can last a couple years on that.
My medlar grafts on pear and quince are both showing growth. Hoping I can get all of them to take. I’m going hard next year with a bunch of medlar. I found several places with a lot of scion varieties.
It should work. Medlar seems quick to take to graft and is not afraid to give it up in the future, but it wants to grow its own roots enough that what it’s nurse stock is should not really matter. Some of the nurses may try to grow around it still for longer than others.
they do seem like a very cool nursery. I know they graft theirs onto Hawthorn. I got the Puciu mol last year but it was very small and at such a great price. Took a while to leaf out, developed a couple leaves and then died after three months or so. I’m thinking maybe too much sun or wind…
