These pears are loaded down heavy with fruit. I’m having trouble capturing in a photo how many hundreds of pounds these pears carry nearly every year! The goal is to get fruit and there is no Arguing with consistent results. Many of these pears are 3/4 of a pound and others are over a pound each! Once I’ve grafted over the new Orchards to fruit the yields will be enormous. These have the potential to feed a lot of people.
Improved Kieffer
Duchess D’angoulme
Douglas
wow! im jealous.
I usually don’t post how badly I failed to thin. Here is Flavor King pluot. Thinned ok not great.
Yes if size of fruit is an issue or other problems like biennial production occur that’s a problem. That’s not the issue with what you posted they all look great! Douglas is my problem child that is a very heavy producing pear or hardly at all. Not for the reasons you would think. It’s due to its tendency to bloom extremely early. That’s a blessing this year because it bloomed before all the cold freezes came and set fruit. Other pears lost fruit due to freezes that bloomed later. Not at all what I expected. I’m still processing what to do if anything different long term.
Yours will be the same way soon enough if they are not on their way to heavy production now. There are some good fruit growers on this forum we all share our methods to get better.
Amazing. Thank goodness the tree is able to support all that weight.
I wish I would have taken a picture of my two trees I just thinned before the rain storm we had a few days ago. I have two apple trees that had so much fruit the branches touched the ground. I was afraid the extra water the trees got the branches would break. I took off about half the fruit so they would not break.
That’s thinking! What do you do with them when your ripening them? I’ve been known to have an entire room used where I had a thousand pounds of pears ripening! Years ago I bought several Rubbermaid trashcans which I filled with pears and apples. Once every week i would need to sort the barrel looking for bad or ripening fruit. A more open space is great like a table top that’s a flat surface. Flat surfaces only work with a small crop! I’m making upgrades hopefully soon to take care of that.
That’s a bigger crop than it looks like. Lots of work goes into putting that away. Looks great nice work!
Sometimes they break no matter what you do. I had a major storm come through a year ago during harvest time when the pears were all heavy with fruit it broke lots of branches and I’m still cleaning them up. The only thing the storm seemed to bother was me the pears acted like it only provoked them to set more fruit. Ayers did incredibly well without 1 broken branch on any tree.
It’s a balancing act if you leave to much fruit on it hurts the quality of the fruit in many ways and at times the tree. In Kansas we seldom get the rain they might have in some locations so our weight 4limits on branches are different. In an area where they get heavy frequent rain during harvest time it can limits hundreds of pounds to every limb. The only way I had the equivalent of that happen I once had 4 or 5 large raccoons on the same pear branch that broke it off. My mother had her eyes on those pears that year and let’s just say she was not happy about that. Laughed about it myself as I found it incredibly funny those raccoons did not realize how big they were. Now I leave lots of the windfalls for the deer, possums, and raccoons and it saves them climbing trees or breaking branches. Everyone seems to be happy that way. Everything is in balance here and what I’m doing works.
One bucket was cut up for drying, one was put through the cider mill, and two more buckets are ripening for the cider mill. I found they don’t have to sit and ripen before the dehydrator. They turn out great even if the fruit is still pretty hard.
