A couple years ago I grafted kiefer and improved kiefer to callery.
Last season knotched buds and developed some scaffold branches.
I managed to train a few of those to grow horizontal.
All those that I managed to get horizontal growth on look like the pic above. Those look like fruit spurs to me.
The limbs that grew more upright dont have those.
TNHunter
that probably won’t make much of a difference.
The hormones going up from the roots need to be in balance with the hormones coming down from the growing tips. Adding another rootstock does nothing to slow down the hormones coming up from the original rootstock.
Where there is some evidence if i recall correctly that an interstem of a dwarfing stock often brakes down some of those root made hormones. And that does change the “balance” of the tree more into fruit production.
@oscar i know that its possible and even done in commercial orchards to grow pears in high density systems like apples but can they be pruned like apples? tall spindle would be how i want to grow mine. removing larger branches every year and keeping young fruit producing growth. if this is the case, hopefully it applies to asian pears and in containers as well.
After a seedling pear has grown for a couple of years, you can potentially reduce the tree’s juvenile phase by grafting a seedling pear that already has its first flower buds in a position of apical dominance onto the pear you want to fruit sooner.
At least it works according to Ivan Michurin—although the idea has never been tested. Recent studies on florigen suggest that not only is this possible, but it may indeed be likely to work. I’ll let everyone know for sure in a couple of years if it actually does.
Of course, this probably doesn’t work for grafting named cultivars, but I thought people might find it interesting.
My understanding is commercial growing (Washington state) is done with high use of giberellins.
They are available on Amazon, and elsewhere for very little cost. Melatonin is available in the drug store for under $10.
If both are proven to help, just dose and application technique need study.
I have had a stressed pear. Planted in in 2023 as a tall 8gal, then second year (2024)decided to move it. Broke the shovel handle at about 9:45PM and finished digging it out using a hand spade and a box cutter, cutting off a really big root in order to complete the job. Had lots of blossoms the next year (2025). Except it came out with extremely pale leaves, so with my known alkaline soil I did a foliar iron application, that I must have badly messed up the mix ratio on as it took off 70% the leaves and all but a couple of the baby fruit.
I can let you know how it does this year.
Poor tree thinks I am an idiot and a hack.
i have a seckel at 3rd leaf that gave me 2 or 3 fruit last summer. it is 4 feet tall. a stick really. i do not know how it happened or why. it had about a dozen but i pulled almost all of them so as not to stress it, but couldn’t resist having a few.
it is in close proximity to a mounded annual bed so perhaps it got a boost from that manure and such
aren’t the harrow series pretty early to bear? my harrow delight is 3rd leaf this year, lots of flowers last year. i think it was harrow sweet that i heard suggested as an early bearing variety.
gibberins (sp?) do they diminish the productive lifespan of the tree? in a commercial orchard it wouldn’t matter as much but I’m planting for future peoples at my place
Fair question. And I am not sure. I’d use AI to search senescence of the whole tree.
Gibberellin- wiki link there, are kind of the master hormone. They affect growth more than fruiting, or at least do if you apply them “wrong” (and I’m not very qualified to say what that means).
A local leader- not so much a breeder, but an experimenter in pushing zones (I’m in 3b/4a) who has done field beta testing of fruit for Canada’s premiere nursery and been in the local newspaper at least once- shared his experiences with using them. (I always use plural because there are 125+ “kinds” across all botany, and as I understand it several per species.)
He had intense, excessive growth akin to water sprouts, and what could be called subtle fascination, with distorted growth… but, no luck in increasing fertility or making it more precocious.
It sounds to me, and this is speculation, that gibberellin quantity (quality?) may explain both dwarfing and explain the precocity sometimes found in cross species grafts (using Saskatoon for apple or cotoneaster for pear for example).
Such results may be explained by mismatches that are accidentally narrowly beneficial between rootstock and scion.
Or maybe it’s other hormones.
To get back more on topic, I think there has been commercial motivation on pears than most fruit tree genus, to get a working hormone adjuster. Promalin® is one that uses benzyladenine (BA) as well as gibberellins. The GA3 or a mixture of GA4+7, are the specific utilized gibberellins in commercial treatments in pear orchards. Seems like they use different ones for different purposes and it’s all part of the game in commercial fields. Slightly, you fight “trade secrets” with finding out what commercial sprays are, though most of the information is out there. I configured this search and the AI summary gives a ton of very specific usage facts
I can second that based on my own observations. For example, my Bell pear seems to be more precocious compared to the Potomac and Harrow Crisp pears I have planted on the same rootstock (OHxF 87) and in the same location.
I grafted improved kiefer and kiefer and Orient to callery spring 2023.
The two kiefers bloomed and set fruit this spring.. year 3.
I summer pruned them last summer.
One produced 2 sets of blossoms… the other 7.
They had little fruitlets on early last week when we got 29F. I hope they survive that.
TNHunter
A few of my earlier blooming pears were nipped by the cold. The fruit were not affected, but newly emerged leaves are partly blackened. Later blooming varieties are just now in full bloom.
I have Warren and Magness on a large rootstock maybe 25 or 30 years old. Both have fruit this year. Warren made first fruit the summer of 2024. This will be the first year Magness produces fruit. I grafted both in April 2020 from scions supplied by LuckyP
@Fusion_power… how cold did it get down your way ?
We got 29F here.. but it was a little odd.. no sign of frost on the grass and none on my old truck windshield.
Like it was a dry cold.
My pear leaves looked a little frazzled.. curled some, but none actually died or turned brown.
Some of my pear fruitless appear to be ok.. growing some more since the frost.
TNHunter
I did not get an accurate temp reading, but based on plant damage it was about 27 or 28F. Pears usually sail through it but in this case, a few trees had leaves nearly fully expanded. They took a bit of damage. Fruit are unaffected.
It dropped down to 10 here killing many blossoms.
Those improved kieffer are typically very cold tolerant.
I had lows around 25F and some freezing rain the night before. I think I have some blossom blast on one pear tree now. Black spots at the base of flowers just opening on that one.
Most of the pears didn’t have open flowers yet. My Dutchess D’Angouleme graft is flowering for the first time though (only 3 years old) and so that’s nice - It had only a few flowers open. I don’t know if it will fruit - if it does, I hope it makes it through the next cold spell. I grafted it on a big old pear.
Yeah florigens are produced in leaves can travel through the plant. I imagine a good graft union would be permeable to it.
Although there’s also things that antagonize florigens produced locally in a plant
Definitely. Florigens have been shown to be capable of long-distance transport through the phloem and across graft unions, and there are also studies showing that they can induce earlier flowering.
I’m doing a few small experiments with things that are known to take a long time to come into bearing—seedling pears, Shipova, and a few others—by grafting them as interstems between two aronias. My suspicion is that they’ll flower earlier than they otherwise would have, though whether the effect will be significant remains to be seen.
I summer pruned my Pears last August… and they bloomed some that fall… then again this spring..
Frost took them all out.
TNHunter
I grafted Pear to cotoneaster in May 2023. This year I have blooms. 3 yrs compared to 7!
@aplguy I think the big difference is size, you probably top grafted and replaced the whole top of a larger cottoneaster, right?
