I suspect they are being grown in Canada. Here pears are mostly grown in the west and they have ways to keep Bartlett salable for a very long time.
I’m actually surprised that Hudson Valley growers haven’t taken to Harsweet just based on their reliability and psyla resistance. Crazy.
At any rate @alan your very modest but i learned a great deal about pear growing and fruit growing in general from you, @Lucky_P, @scottfsmith, and @fruitnut to name a few. Pears were in this country in trouble but now i have seen renewed interest in growing them, eating them etc. . There are people in my area making alcohol from pears as we speak. Hopefully he is making perry. Much of the renewed interest is because people in less than hospitable climates heard about pears that would grow in their area from you on the old gardenweb and now on growingfruit. We all play a part in that even now but no doubt the future of pears is in its infancy and will hopefully soon catch up to apples in the United States as impossible as that sounds. @applenut has done incredible work spreading apple growing into less fortunate countries and i would love to see that eventually done with pears.
I wish it were too cold here for Callery rootstocks. These wild Callery trees are taking over here in Ohio. The nurseries are not allowed to sell certain ornamental pear trees because of the issue of the seedlings being so prolific and invasive they once thought were sterile.
@MikeC
Its not to cold there they adapt and will adapt to his environment also. It was to cold in Kansas and they only lived 20 years supposedly and i have seen very old trees and they thrive in cold winters -20f.
It’s funny how you can spread “information” based on clear anecdotal observations or the information provided by the researchers and be equally wrong.
However, when you observe something completely contradictory of the literature it’s probably safe to say the literature is at least partially wrong.
If rootsocks are seedling based and not clonal, there is going to be a tremendous amount of variability. Maybe that has something to do with this particular contradiction.
Those ornamental pears are so common place and produce so many seeds that we may be breeding strains that flourish in an increasingly wide range of habitat.
@alan
Yes thats exactly the case so much so that im betting some callery are on 100+ generations of wild breeding by now. This thread demonstrates the unusual genetic diversity when you see the callery fruit Callery pear as rootstock?. Look at this thread and you decide Favor for a friend - Top working Pears!. This thread gives you an idea of how they are adapting Wild callery pear rootstocks. We had some wild callery crosses we found growing in standing water Wild callery pear rootstocks. I used those seedlings in areas that sometimes have standing water. They are at times crossed with BET seedlings or other pears. Imagine harrow delight grafted on wild callery crosses they are an excellent pear tree!
You are becoming the Luther Burbank of low input midwestern pear production.
I am so excited!!! I have new trees of both harrow sweet and delight!!! Im up to 10 varieties and more on the way!!!
@PaulinKansas6b you wont regret planting those but the crops are not high quantity but rather high quality in the case of harrow sweet. Harrow delight is earlier and far more productive.
Here Harrow Sweet is just as productive and they are the two most productive pears I grow, by far. Especially when weighing in relative maintenance required.
Bosc, Seckel and several other pears completely defoliated early this year after bearing light crops. Probably be light next year as a result.
@alan my trees are still young perhaps harrow sweet fruit will become larger as they mature more. The trees are not large though they do fruit heavily.
More precocious usually equals less vigorous. Pull off blossoms if you want bigger trees or thin early and aggressively.
Such trees will still expend more energy than others on next season’s flower buds, which form the growing season before they blossom. The most vigorous growth comes from juvenile wood.
It creates a level of dwarfing no matter what you do. In pears it may reduce the risk of fire blight.
@alan
What i normally do is take the pears while i can get them and just pull off flower buds the first 2 years. I made a mistake with that in the case of harrow sweet. In Kansas we get late freezes which sometimes compromise blossoms. In harrow sweets case it blooms late so its had less time to grow because less flower buds get nipped and it produces faster in the first place. Harrow sweet may be a pear that as you mentioned i may need to rethink my management style with. Thank you for the honest recommendations Alan as always i respect your orchard management techniques but try and adapt them to Kansas. This year as an example due to heavy fruit set and extreme storms many of my pears suffered severe branch damage. In your area because no such conditions exist your forced to prune to replicate what we have naturally that stimulates vigor occasionally. This winter i will prune off damaged areas. We typically have blossoms frozen on all other pears which gives the pear trees a chance to get larger and put out more vegetative growth. Management is different and yet we still have the same goals. Im forced to grow full sized trees so most of my crop is above the deer browsing range. Im sure most people want dwarf trees. Land is not a premium in Kansas at $3,000 per acre whereas in some locations land might be 10 000 - 40,000 per acre so we can experiment more. I will grow harrow on BET rootstock next like an asian pear.
Interesting!!! Yeah I hope to get a few more Harrow introductions for experimenting!! I am very hopeful about the others i have as well, Blakes Pride, Harvest Queen, Potomic, Shenandoah etc… I love it here in KS and have several acres of this cheap land to experiment on… 
the key is to get stuff planted soon so 7 years from now we can be well on the way to assessing results!!!
@PaulinKansas6b
Potomac are beautiful pears and did very well here in terms of production but were literally blown off the trees this year. Pears can do very well in Kansas but its going to take us some time to work them in to the crop rotation schedule here. I’m determined to revive the interest in pears in this state and introduce or promote them in the rest of the world. It’s my goal to make pears the #1 fruit out there. There are people like @coolmantoole that are just as determined to promote them in the South or Bernie in Canada. Pears should be planted in 1000x more acreage than what they are! @PaulinKansas6b you and I , @39thparallel, @Olpea and many others will revive interest in pears in this state!
I should have mentioned on my previous post that I realized you already knew much of what I wrote. I routinely post stuff for others with less experience.
I was under the impression you grafted your pears on wild trees that were already on the property.
Yes in many cases i do dig up wild pears and plant them on my property or order BET, callery, ohxf rootstocks etc. To use.
That is great Clark!!! Yeah pear is in my top fruits and I plan to add a dozen more soon!!! I also added a russian pear that they say has never had its blooms damaged and is as much as a month later bloomer than average!!!
@clarkinks,
I saw this dead twig on my HS last week and forgot about it. I broke off the dead twig today. Noticed that the last leave on it was still healthy green. It looked like fire blight but it did not spread after a week since spotted it.
Its odd is does not have a shepards hook like fireblight does.
