Good luck harvesting fruit from that tree. You’re going to need a much longer ladder.
Thanks, Alan, I’ll give Harrow a try. I may graft it into something, have to find a tree that blooms at about the same time. Have lots of choices 
That might be the most comprehensive pruning doc anywhere. Thanks for sharing!
You’re all very welcome, but thank Mark for finding it - Mark, thank you, a most comprehensive article for sure!
Patty S.
Chicken, I would peg those long, tall pliable branches down, pointing downward to the ground. You have the room, where I do not. And, I know this sounds severe, but I would drop crotch prune that tree way down further. I am a “No Ladders” kinda gal. As an RN, I know that the #1 cause of serious/fatal injuries in the home involve ladders. It is really rather frightening. I have ladders grouped into my “Things I Am Obsessively Afraid Of”, along with our rattlesnakes and scorpions out here, lol!!
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[quote=“hoosierquilt, post:25, topic:1592”]
. I am a “No Ladders” kinda gal. As an RN, I know that the #1 cause of serious/fatal injuries in the home involve ladders. It is really rather frightening. [/quote]
I spend more than half my working days going up and down step ladders on usually uneven ground while pruning a wide range of tree heights (and now thinning fruit). It helps to use something like the Little Giant ladder design.
If I’m not on completely screwed up ground (sloping in all directions) I can actually swing my weight and control the ladder when it starts to tip over. It is a lack of attention that kills you, but with this ladder there’s a lot of forgiveness. I have taken a couple of falls that could have killed me though, if my head had happened to hit a rock.
Lots more dangerous than rattlesnakes and scorpions, that’s for sure.
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No kidding, My legs don’t help at all.
You’re so right, Alan. And, I bet you have always used good, high quality ladders, like the Little Giant because you appreciate using good tools. Good tools reduce the chances of injuring yourself. If you depend on your physicality to do your job, folks tend to pay attention to that, and make sure to use the “right tool for the right job”, including good ladders. And you pay attention because it’s your job. Same for me when I was a floor nurse. I used proper body mechanics when lifting, I got a buddy if the patient was too heavy or was a fall risk, and used a lift or lift belt. I heard too many horror stories from nurses not doing what they should do, then injuring their backs or shoulders. I was not going to be that “dumb nurse”. Regular homeowners and hobbyists sometimes don’t have the best tools and will try to “make do”, or just don’t pay attention or think through what they’re doing out there in the yard while way off the ground. And, the older I get, the less well I bounce I’m very fortunate to have no physical issues that prevent me from enjoying a high level of physical activity, so I want to make sure I stay that way. No broken hips or cracked crowns wanted. So, if I can avoid using a ladder in my yard, I do. If you keep your trees pruned down, and on dwarfing rootstocks, you just don’t need to use a ladder.
And yes, those danged rattlesnakes are always a danger for us, here, although truly not as dangerous as that dreaded ladder. I have only encountered one scorpion so far in our yard (actually, in our house!), but they’re out there, so we have to always take care when we’re rooting around in the beds. And, we carry a shovel all the time when we’re walking the property and doing stuff in the front orchard, since there is no snake fencing on the front slope. Sadly, that snake fencing hasn’t deterred all the rattlers - we’ve killed 4 inside our backyard which is almost completely surrounded by snake fencing. We’re going to have to complete one section, and that’s going to require us having to probably cut down some of our plants, which is why it is still not done 
We’ve killed 8 rattlers since we moved here in 2009. Almost 2 a year.
@hoosierquilt, that sta-green formulation isn’t too far from GRO-POWER FLOWER ‘N’ BLOOM 3-12-12. Do you have a preference between the two?
I’m not a pear guy, but I would be inclined to top that tree off at knee height or just above that lower set of branches. The lower canopy will still give you a decent harvest and allow you to ditch that ladder.
Clint, if Walter Andersen Nursery were closer to me, I’d pick Gro-Power over my choice, mainly due to the humic acid, which is extremely helpful for us here in S. California. But, it’s a 45 min. drive and I don’t often get to to drive down to Poway and pick it up. I think Grangettos in Escondido used to carry it, but think I have to special order it from them, now. Which I can do if I remember. I really like Gro-Power’s products. They are just perfectly suited for our soils.
Well, serious fruit growers should spring for a good ladder. The LG knockoffs aren’t expensive and LG makes a light one without a life time guarantee that also goes for similar money. It should last a lifetime of hobby fruit growing.
But then, they are expensive compared to bottom of the line step ladders that are only really made for hard, flat surfaces.
That is serious fruit growers that like growing fruit on trees and not bushes. Nothing wrong with fruit bushes.
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Chikn,
I’d prune that tree way down to an open vase system, where you don’t need a ladder to do anything. I have over 40 fruit trees and I can reach every one of them standing on the ground, and I harvest more fruit than I, my family, and the neighborhood can eat.
As far as fertilizers, I grew fruit trees and vegetables in sandstone in Topanga for a decade without ever resorting to any specialty fertilizers and never suffered any deficiencies. I used a lot of oak tree leaf mold and their compost- their roots pretty much find what a tree needs. The broken up sandstone couldn’t hold much water by itself.
If I wanted to juice things up with more N and K, I’d use free alfalfa shake from a horse feed store as a mulch. You can swear by a product as having some special qualities, but if you aren’t comparing different elements you are simply following marketing, IMO. But then, I only grew stuff in Santa Monica mountain soil and soil right by the beach. Still, I bet the commercial growers don’t rely on any such products as you are talking about. Bone meal- really? Trees almost never suffer P deficiency in CA soils.
My grandad owned a commercial orchard near Grandjunction Colorado in the 1950’s. When I was a kid he still had some of his old apple picking ladders. The were wooden step ladders , 20 feet long, but they were made with only one leg on off side. I suppose they were made that way for the uneven ground but they looked pretty scary to me.
Alan, the bone meal is an aside, I use this product because it is low in N and easy to find. It is impossible to find a low N fertilizer in any big box store anymore. I complained to both HD and Lowe’s about it. What Clint showed is even better, that product (and many of their other products) are really especially designed for S. California soils. With all my DG, and I really thin soil, so the humic acids helps with my wood chip mulch to return more organic materials into my super skinny soil. I try to mulch every two years with about 3 to 6" of wood chip mulch, which has helped tremendously. I can dig in my soil now and find lots of earthworms, always a great, great sign. Oak leaf mold is fabulous, which I could find that. I don’t really want a lot of N around my pears, as I am always paranoid about FB, since I did find it on my Seckel in it’s second season (so much for being FB resistant - not.) Pruned the living daylights out of it, and that taught me not to be so afraid of pruning, lol!! And actually our commercial growers out here in N. San Diego county in the hills do apply humic acid. It does help. If I don’t have DG, I have actual granite boulders, caliche, and a few rare pockets of clay. Which is always weird to find when I dig a hole. I have to do a double take to be sure.
HQ, new products are invented all the time. I actually don’t care who uses what but I hate the hype when it isn’t backed up by specific research. We growers will try something to help our plants and base our purchases on anecdotal observations. But I’ve been doing all this for almost 50 years and I’ve seen so much come and go in small scale horticulture- there’s always some new product being sold that attracts an ardent following.
I think of humic acids as the natural consequence of composting organic matter. From the time I first started pulling my living out of the dirt I covered the soil with some form of mulch- leaves, hay, mowed grass, chipped or shredded wood- whatever I could scrounge up. It all can work very well, and I’m sure supplies ample humic acids.
Maybe you can direct me to some research that supports the use of specialized and commercialized humic acid. I posted something on top from the other side of the discussion for you.
It would probably be easier if everyone who DIDN’T want Harrow Sweet scions put their name on a list 
After all I’ve read about them on this forum I’m planning to graft Harrow Sweet onto everything. Pear trees, oak trees, fence posts, tailpipes, visitors to the yard…
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Wow, I’ve gone to several all-day pruning workshops at UCSC and still, some of the stuff on this great document was news to me! Thanks for the link. (Now I have to go out and look at my fruit trees to assess my bad pruning cuts from the past 
)
Alan, when I have some time to do the research, I’ll post. My understanding on why using fertilizers with humic/fulvic acid is to assist in plants taking up nutrients. Yes, if you have organic material in your soil, you’ve got humic & fulvic acid. And, I’m sure as shootin’ trying to get more organic material in my soil. If you were to have seen my soil before I started mulching, you’d swear someone had laid down one big, gigantic DG pathway. Really, just pulverized granite. California natives did fine, but plants that required more organic matter struggled, even with pretty copious amounts of fertilizer. So, I decided to use fertilizers with more humic acid while I started adding organic materials to my soil. I don’t have access to something as wonderful as oak leaf mold - just lots of wood chips - and after 6 years, things are improved. But, for those 1st few years, it did help having a fertilizer with some humic acid in it. I didn’t have to apply double or triple the amount of regular fertilizer, which was rather costly. So, it certainly helped my very young trees get established while the soil organisms worked their magic with my mulch. I’m the absolute last person to be taken in by hype and hoopla with some of the crazy stuff you hear about in the organic horticultural world (no offense to those who are strictly organic, please, I do try to stay as organic as possible), and this is not in that category, Alan. Just small amounts of additional humic and fulvic acids added to the fertilizers, formulated specifically for our thinner S. California soils.
I do that constantly, and have probably messed my trees up some by not having a clear picture of an overriding approach! Most useful thing to me has been the 1-2-3 approach to pruning that Alan describes.