The Quince C that used to be planted a lot. Had some lackluster frost resistance. Especially when young.
newer and other quince rootstocks have better frost resistance.
Quince Adams (vigor between Quince C and Quince A) and Quince E(line) (vigor slightly higher/similar to C) should be fine in 6A USDA zones https://www.q-eline.net/about-q-eline/
Quince E also gives less bronze coloring (smoother green skin) on some pears. Not a big deal for me, since i usually remove skin on pears(unlike apples) But if i find a pear variety with a thin unnoticable skin, the quince E might have an major advantage.
i think the choice of rootstock and branching height depends on a lot of factors.
Sure if you have deer, you might prefer higher tree’s.
However if you don’t have deer… not having to use a ladder is really nice.
If irrigation is really hard or expensive. You might want to go full size rootstocks. However in most commercial situations the cost of extra labor of picking higher/larger tree’s vastly outweighs the cost of extra irrigation for dwarf trees.
We have orchards or standard size trees and it becomes obvious why the yield is low when you work them. A standard does not bear much fruit in the center, so with a standard size tree there is a very large unproductive center of a tree. Even if the center did produce, it would be extremely difficult to pick.
Our pears are about 70 years old on standard roots and we keep them very short to facilitate labor. They are also planted at 8 foot in row spacing. If you saw them, you would not say that it was a standard tree, and the yields don’t approach 6 bushels per tree either.
Also, the guyot article you linked is showing much larger than dwarf trees. Multileader trees are grown on a bit larger rootstock. Up to M106 class for a lot of leaders. And most peaches are grown on standard size stock and you can still get quick returns on them since they fruit so quickly.
Pear can easily produce 6 bushels but that is dependant on variety grafted on the standard rootstock. Kieffer , Duchess D’ Angoulme produce heavy whereas others may not produce 1 bushel. Many canned bartlett i’ve read and been told are really canned kieffer. Callery is by many considered full sized though they seldom get real large here. The clay soil dwarfs any tree somewhat. Do you know the rootstock under those old pears?
They are getting better, the last quince rootstocks i tried 100% died. A few lived 1 or 2 years i think. They never grew much the environment here is way to harsh for them.
IDK much about Quince rootstock.
I had some seedling Cydonia quince, grown from seed that the late Lon Rombough sent me. It was easy to root - just stuck cuttings in the ground, and away they’d go. On a lark, I potted up several and grafted Warren pear onto them; no failures that I can recall. Gave them all away, so I have no idea how they did or if they’re still alive.
Maybe 12-15 yrs ago, I played around with grafting an 8-10 inch interstem of OHxF 513 (admittedly, on it’s own, 513 makes a tree 70% of standard) between callery rootstock and 20 or so fruiting pear cultivars… there’s been no dwarfing as far as I can ascertain - those trees are 20+ ft tall and reaching for the sky.
Have not attempted putting an interstem of hawthorn in between callery and fruiting variety, but that might provide some dwarfing. The one remaining pear I have on cockspur hawthorn understock is over 20 yrs old, and only 9-10 ft tall… but is singularly unproductive - but it is almost enveloped by several mayhaws and ungrafted hawthorns that I need to remove.
I am wondering if there is any hard evidence that semi dwarfs do not live as long as standard trees for example m106 vs b118 or seedling. ohxf87 vs bartlett seeding, callery or BET.
It’s easy to say standard trees live longer when the 100 year old trees were planted before semi-dwarf rootstocks were available.
I am not trying to argue, just wondering if there is any scientific research about semi-dwarfs and lifespan.
Really old trees i have found did not produce fruit or the fruit was inferior. There was a pear about 15 feet tall on my property where my pond dam is that was planted by the original occupants of this land 100 or so years ago. When i got the land, i got every other tree cut off of it and got to try the pears. Not far away on the neighbors property i saw another that was not producing. The old pear and many of my old orchard trees i planted were bulldozed during the pond expansion. Many dwarfs dont die they stop producing. It happens to seedlings and standards as well. A guy down the road just got less and less fruit on his dwarf. My moms dwarfs died. Have a dwarf down there now that is fruitless at my original orchard. We don’t know when it happens specifically in my opinion. We can be pretty sure in 15-20 years most dwarfs begin to dwindle. Modern people supposedly get tired of a variety long before that but they dont know how i feel about my pears.
I think StarkBros says pears on standard rootstock produce 3 bushels of pears on average and not 6. This seemed to correlate with other trees except for apples where they claim apples produce much more for some reason. I would argue 3 bushels of a fruit from 1 tree is enough for one person and the fact you are often planting 2 trees unless grafting the average person will get more than their share as that will be 6 bushels of a fruit between 2 trees. Once you get to the point many of us have with trees we have to figure out ways to store them as a home gardener. Like you said you get a few bushels but a few bushels is quite a bit even if it is the Stark Bros 3 bushel amount.
It doesn’t matter how much fruit I get for one person. I share fruit with my neighbors, organize upick for friends, my kids sell fruit on the corner with their lemonade stand etc.
I’m using Callery and M111. My opinion is standard root stocks just produce tougher trees. You can make them whatever size you want and they live long lives.
Dwarfing pear rootstocks are not bad, but I find dwarfing apple rootstocks to be trash.
I did an evolution over time from dwarf to standard. The main cause was the deer, standards are high and it is easy to thumb your nose at the deer once they are big enough. But longevity is also a real issue as I have had an orchard long enough to see dwarf trees run out of gas.
That said I still like quince a lot on pears, it is much more precocious and it will get above the deer pretty easily. If I was starting a new orchard I would put in most of the pears on quince. Recently I added a new pear stand all on standard, but I will still be getting plenty of pears before those fruit so I can afford to wait.
So as someone said above, it’s all about what’s best for your own personal situation.
Not only that but quince are not as winter hardy. I ordered a custom rogue red pear from Cummins and they put it in as quince rootstock at first. I asked them to change it due to my winter hardiness and they changed it to OHXF 87. OHXF rootstock can handle zone 4 temperatures while quince is solid zone 6 and maybe zone 5 depending on the quince rootstock. I remember reading about how their pear tree died in zone 5 overwinter due to it being too cold. You won’t have that issue on pear rootstock.
Only if you try to maintain a central leader tree and don’t do quite a bit of summer pruning. Every very old apple tree I manage is trained to some form of an open center- you simply are motivated to cut out the center to keep the crop low and light evenly distributed. The reason big trees are not as productive as smaller trees in commercial production is partially because it requires too much time and knowledge to keep them at max productivity.
I will take some pictures this year of a few of the trees I manage shortly before harvest to show you what I mean. There is no reason a big tree can’t be maintained to have good distribution of light. It’s just a cheaper process to accomplish with a dwarf tree.
Another apparent advantage of seedling rootstocks on a mature tree seems to be that it reduces the tendency to biennial bearing- at least in non-commercial production where chemical thinners are not being used.
I just did a search for an article from probably over a century ago in Cornell archives. There are photos of a Cornell professor making huge cuts in about a 50 ft apple tree to bring it down to about half that height. I searched, and not only didn’t find that article- I couldn’t find a single article by someone who seemed genuinely experienced doing major renovations of old apple trees. One method that works without creating an open center tree is to prune big old apple trees to a weep- it doesn’t matter if there aren’t apples in the center of the tree in such structure, production can be very high just by having well lit fruit on the outside of the tree with this method.
It was my starting point over 30 years ago and I’ve since developed my own methods as most professionals would. However, when I’m training tall apple trees to a weep, this covers it beside the insistence of the author that it’s important to maintain a central leader… It simply isn’t. Maybe that big center cut is more dangerous in colder climates in Canada.
