Abate Fetel and Concorde are two of the most elegant pears that exist. Fetel is my absolute favorite and I cannot wait for it to fruit. The taste is excellent as well. Just sweet enough. They just look beautiful on the tree. There is one other elongated Italian pear (cannot remember the name) that is right up there with Fetel. Fetel is the most beautiful pear. Agreed.
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Here in the Northeast, not so much. It is very susceptible to scab, pear psyla and fireblight. This year I didn’t get enough spray on it to keep it in adequate foliage to sweeten its fruit at all and it was the only one out of about 10 varieties here that sucked.
Yet at some sites the above pests haven’t shown themselves and it does quite well. Anywhere I manage old trees, though, the pests have found them.
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I grafted my Abate Fetel on quince ba-29-c. It fruited a few years after I grafted it. You should have seen it it was a tiny tree but it made thick branches and bloomed and fruited. I only allowed it to keep two pears and both were excellent. The only pear I ever fruited better than that was Seckel which only fruited one year for me(lack of chill). Unfortunatley I had to move the next year after Abate Fetel fruited. I think about that tree all the time. Abate Fetel never blighted in the few years I had it. Even in years when other varieties got hit. MrsG I think there are a few Italian varieites with long necks but I can’t recall there names right now. For what its worth to anyone I think AF is pretty low chill.
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Thanks Wild, I am aware of the chill factor and the chances of the tree surviving might be fine but producing fruit is another. Raintree, from whom I purchased the tree states it is growing from zone 5 to zone 9. That is quite a stretch. I am on the same latitude as Goult France and they grow there. Fingers crossed.
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Best if luck Mrsg! The good news is you can grow many things that we in the south only wish we could.
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@fruitnut,
As I was eating some grocery store pears today I purchased on a song ( 5/$1) i was thinking about you and wondering how your Bosc crop is doing this year? Any chances of pictures while they are on the tree? I cannot grow pears as cheap as I bought these but I’m a little apprehensive to eat them all because there must be something wrong with them right? The first one I ate tasted perfect! I’d feel better if I grew these!
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My fire blight, psyla and fabracea leaf spot love them! Of all the pears I grow they love Bosc the most
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I have bought Bosc in the store and very much enjoyed them. We have a tree that was planted in 2013 that is doing well.
Bartlet is my Hubby’s favorite, and we have two big old trees, and three young trees of Bartlet. It’s about time to pick them here.
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Bosc is also the hands down favourite Euro pear in our extended family. I have one second leaf tree but no fruit this year. Had couple last year. It’s prone to pear rust here in Zone 8. Wishit was as easy to grow and productive as our Ambrosia apple trees, another family favourite.
Anthony
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I love a good properly ripe Bosc pear fruit, yet the fact that they can be such a disease and pest magnet keeps me from wanting to get the variety.
I was reading that Docteur Desportes, that Doyenne Gris, and that Elliot are like Bosc, fruit wise (taste, texture, juiciness, flavor strength, and sweetness) which is the closest variety to Bosc, is there any other variety that you know of that is close to Bosc?
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I’m a big fan of bosc ever since my friend from work gave us boxes of them and we dried them.
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It’s definitely one of the prettiest pears!
By the way, @Blake discovered one which seems to have some FB-resistance–at least in this region:
I grafted it this season, and look forward to seeing how it does.
Anyway, this might be of interest to those of you who’ve avoided growing Bosc because of its disease-susceptibility.
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I just bought some Bosc pears from the grocery store, because they looked way better, and they smelled way better than the Bosc pears that I usually see for sale anywhere. The juice it’s self was sweet like candy, and so tasty. To my surprise the flesh was soft with very little crisp. So I was right, I knew I ate a pear that looked exactly like a bosc pear, and that tasted like a bosc pear yet was soft, I spent so much time trying to figure out what variety of pear it was.
How has Docteur Desportes done for you over the years? You have been growing it a long time.
How crunchy are the pears, and can they be soft? If so, then how soft?
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Here in NY Bosc is also highly susceptible to pear psyla, which is difficult to control once/if it shows up and destroys the quality of its fruit via premature defoliation. It’s too much work for me to grow and even though it is highly susceptible to FB, psyla is much more an issue in my area.
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Are you talking about Bosc it’s self? Because the topic sort of has turned in to Bosc like pears as well.
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@fruitnut is the only one @alanmercieca i have known who can really grow bosc. They get fireblight here before they even bloom. There is nothing better than a really good bosc. They are as you describe them. What a great pear from the expert pear breeder van mons. No one has ever bred pears better than he did. It is unlikeley they ever will. If you ask me to rate a good bosc it is a 9 or 10 on a 10 scale. The Clarks yellow pear is also at that level and equally as impossible to grow sometimes. Pears like warren are very easy to grow and rate just below bosc. Harrow sweet is another i think a small child could grow with a little guidance that rates very high. Potomac is another very easy to grow good flavored pear. All that said bosc can be better and even the highest quality if grown right in the ideal location with the ideal weather. Not to much water, not exposed to extremely hot direct sun or over shaded, the prior year needed to be good to store nutrients in the roots, no loss of foliage the previous year to early, enough nutrients but not to many , the right type of soil preferably slightly higher ph around 7. Enough organic mTerial in the soil and soil organisms to feed on them, traces of boron, woodchips around the tree to even out moisture intake through the season, properly thinned crop, etc.
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When it is good it is very good, but it is not consistently good. This last year they were bland compared to my better pears. In its favor it wasn’t the only bland one, Dana Hovey was also bland and it never has been bland before. It is soft when ripe like most European pears.
So overall I am less excited about it than I used to be. I have a small tree and I had grafted a new tree maybe three years ago, but changed my mind and that new tree is now something else.
This year Magness and Urbaniste were both excellent, they were by far the best
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That same thing happens here. It takes 3 or 4 years of fruiting to really know how good a pears fruit actually is. I have nearly removed some really great trees.
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I wonder if it would be worth it hybridizing Bosc with Callery, some of the seedlings should not be so sensitive to fireblight or pear psyla, and then hybridize those seedlings with Bosc.
Maybe even doing the same thing with Docteur Desportes.
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