Yes Harrow sweet is everyone’s favorite when it’s ripe and here it’s higher quality than Harrow delight. They do not ripen at the same time HD is early summer and HS is fall. The size of HS is typically half of HD and magness but it can be equal size when excessively thinned. Hs has a tendency to bear to heavy so it takes time removing pears most years. Magness is not a heavy bearer and like HS slightly more suseptible to disease than HD. Harrow sweet is slightly more susceptible to disease than harrow delight or Warren as mentioned but all are very resistant. WARREN and Magness are both light bearers and HS and HD are both heavy bearing pears. Warren and Magness slightly shade Harrow delight in taste but they are later and are not commercial quantity so not comparable. Harrow delight must be grown in full hot sun if not the quality will be low. Warren and Magness can be grown in partialshade and still produce higher quality pears. Is Warren a higher quality pear? Yes your 1 peace of fruit to every 30 peaces of Harrow delight fruit will taste slightly better. Is that a higher quality tree? In my opinion because of the issues Warren and magness have Harrow delight and Harrow sweet make more sense in Kansas. Where there is higher disease pressure like the south Warren makes more sense than HS or Magness. Many southern growers will choose ayers but it can have some off taste in the peal and some grit in the skin sometimes. Ayers is a true melting delicious pear that is similar in production to Harrow delight (a heavy producer). Someone can argue Warren is a higher quality tree but my opinion is different a tree like Warren that makes 50 -100 pears on a full sized treeis hardly the quality of ayers or Harrow delight overall. Ayers and HD are both disease resistant like Warren but can produce 50 times as many pears in the same space as Warren. Magness is so much like Warren you can get the two trees mixed up as they are siblings. Back to what I’m saying I grow 1 Warren tree only because of the light production. Grow 7 or more Harrow delight. Grow 5 ayers trees. The idea of growing pears is to Harvest some. Is it a high quality pear knowing these things? Bartlett is popular with the grower and consumer in certain regions but most of us have to high of disease pressure to grow it. Harrow delight is meant to Rival Bartlett in marginal climate like Canadian prairies where Bartlett is not grown. Kansas is similar to Canada in many ways so Harrow delight is a good fit here. An area with cooler summers that dont reach 100 degrees better stay away from HD they cannot properly ripen it so quality will suffer. The sugar levels will never get high enough in places that are colder but they can grow it. They should stick to other pears better for their cooler climate. Cold weather can concentrate sugars in fruit as well when temperatures are extreme. Duchess D’ Angoulme was very late last year so all pears tasted refrigerator ripened as we ate them very late in the year from the tree.
On this tree the red pears are Warren on the left and the green colored ones on the right are ewart aka Karls favorite.
Now look at ayers
Now look at the Harrow delight again from above
Made a similar post to this one every year Here comes the 2016 apple and Pear harvest!
Enjoy Potomac as well and it’s disease resistant Here comes the 2016 apple and Pear harvest!
Back to what I’ve been saying Harrow delight is overall very hard to beat for late bloom time. Heavy harvest, disease resistance. Fast production (3years) if you have the right climate. My property is what I would consider in the Harrow delight goldilocks zone it’s just right here. If you were never a child in Europe or the USA and your reading this thread and don’t understand goldilocks slang here is the children’s story it comes from Goldilocks and the Three Bears | DLTK-Teach