My (prospective) first crop of TWO (2) Warren pears is coming along:
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Those will be soome pampered fruits!
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I have 10 warren and 5 karls fvorite coming this fall. Has anyone used Lorette’s method of summer pruning?
Suckers are reduced by 50% in june, july, and eliminated in august to get the boursons to appear at the base of sucker by the fruiting leaves. The result should be no sucker and a set of soon to be flowers surrounded by leaves. My only concern is fireblight. Can these cuts be cauterized with blow torchto prevent fb?
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Hi Clark:) …by shaping would you prune competing branches close together along trunk? …as in branches shading branches or opposite each other, emerging within 2" of along trunk? Just want good ventilation and light exposure. I do rub buds off of trunk below 30" as they emerge.
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Try to keep it to a central leader until it is at least 30" to 36" tall. Warren is not a huge tree. It is best to let it branch out after you get the trunk height your after. My warren on callery has never went over 16 - 18 feet. Magness on ohxf97 is similar at about 20 feet. They are beautiful trees with no tendency to break branches or other issues some pears have.
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Hi Clark! Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge:) A smaller tree is good.
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Clark, Great set on your Warren. My Warren has a light crop, the Jana’s (probably Warren) great set and Magness somewhere in between.
Question about Karl’s Favorite. I have two grafts that are growing rampantly but are not straight. Is this usual for this variety? It’s grafted at about 42 inches so I need a tall stake to get it going upright.
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That is very typical growth when it grows rapidly. Karl’s favorite is one of the least appreciated pears out there. The tree that it is growing on will likely fruit much heavier in the next few years. Once you have grown it and tasted it you will see what i mean about it tasting good and producing very heavy. I use it mostly to pollinate Warren , but i also love the pear by itself. The real question is does Karls Favorite aka Ewart trigger a hormone in the tree as well as pollinate other pears or is it just a pollinator. That growth has always made me question if it may induce fruiting on the tree in multiple ways.
We know rootstocks influence fruiting and we know scions have some influence on fruiting My latest pear experiments in early fruiting . The phenols are likely much higher in Karls favorite causing rapid growth at the graft Grafting and callusing explained in every detail - tbud pear example
Back to the fruiting hormones Is it possible to make pears fruit faster? . "Fruit set has traditionally been attributed to the action of three hormones, auxin, and/or gibberellin, and/or cytokinin " Frontiers | A dynamic interplay between phytohormones is required for fruit development, maturation, and ripening
Metabolic Profiling of Developing Pear Fruits Reveals Dynamic Variation in Primary and Secondary Metabolites, Including Plant Hormones
Every pear i observed growing in the unusual way that karls favorite does seems to fruit very quickly. That encourages me to think maybe we can attribute some visual observations to certain hormones in certain trees. I have a callery rootstock that induces heavy fruiting at an early age due to.incompatability much like a quince induces heavy fruiting. Observe the callery rootstock on this thread which was very difficult to graft Grafting and callusing explained in every detail - tbud pear example . Once i realized by much trial and error the secret of how to graft these unusual genetic mutations of callery pears i see their usefulness. The hormones in that callery pear or the hormones of Karls favorite hold secrets in hormones triggering fruiting in my opinion. I did no branch bending etc. On the callery below that is natural growth.
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My Warren tree has about 8 pears still on the tree after losing 3 in a wind storm a few days ago. It is grafted on a 6 inch diameter rootstock so has grown very rapidly to about 12 feet tall. Pears are roughly 3 inches long and 2 inches diameter currently. With a little luck, I’ll have a chance to try them in a couple of months.
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Well, today was eye opening. I found a ripe Warren pear on my tree. It had some insect damage and one side was bruised which caused the early ripening. I brought it inside and peeled and cored so I could sample it. MIND BLOWN! It had a very rich pear flavor with intense sweetness and a very nice crunch. I can compare with Kalle aka Red Clapp’s Favorite which I purchased almost a year ago in Walmart. Kalle is smooth and buttery with very little crunch and relatively sweet. Kalle falls far short on the rich pear flavor from Warren. So mark me up as a Warren pear lover. I’m hooked.
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Trust me when i say use Karls favorite aka ewart as a pollinator on all your warren trees. I’m glad to here you like the comice like flavor.
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I’m up to 45 pear varieties and I have 3 colonies of bees in my yard. Pollination was not a problem at all with Warren. The only concern this year was tree size which has just hit 16 feet tall. I’m going to tie down some limbs in a more horizontal position so next year has maximum potential to produce fruit.
My list now looks like this:
Ayers
Bartlett Nye Russet
Bell
Blake’s Pride
Cabot
Clara Frijs
Clarks Yellow
Daisui Li
Douglas
Drippin Honey
Duchess
Early Yellow
Flame
Foley’s
Harrow Delight
Harrow Sweet
Harvest Queen
Highland
Hood
Hosui
Kalle
Kieffer
Korean Giant
Ledbetter
Magness
Maxine
New World
Plumblee
Potomac
Red Li
Scottsboro Callery
Seckel
Seuri Li
Shenanadoah
Shin Li
Shinko
Spalding
Summer Blood Birne
Sunrise
Turnbull Giant
Tyson
Very Late
Warren
Winter Nelis
Ya Li
Next year’s want list is also in progress though far from finished. I will likely cull several of these, but hope to graft most next spring.
Ambrosia
Akizuki Nashi
Aurora
Beurre Alexandre Lucas
Beurre Superfin
Butirra Rosata Morettini
Cocomerina
Dana Hovey
Devoe
Doyenne du Comice
Ewart (Karl’s Favorite)
Honeysweet
Johantorp
Klementinka
Leopardo Morettini
Onward
Pai Li
Rousselet de Reims
Savannah
Summercrisp
Vavilov
Wilder Early
Xinjaing fragrant pear
Yoinashi
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Warren great pear but I can 't get six year old grafts trained horizontal to bloom. That branch just doesn’t want to make flowers; what few it makes do get pollinated. Maybe I’m the outlier. Same age Magness is going crazy with production.
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Early yellow and Clarks yellow are likely synonymous. I have herd my little pear called both.
I got Early Yellow from LuckyP. It has not yet fruited so I am not yet certain if it is the same as Clark’s Small Yellow. I already have it flagged as a possible duplicate.
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I have several (10) also. Johantorp is on Postman’s Curator’s Choices. Several of us have grown it in Sonoma County, CA an hour north of San Francisco. It is horrible here - not edible. Same for Tennosui. I have grafted both over to other varieties.
I have Vavilov’s sister seedling Rousselet of Stuttgart x Dr. Jules Guyot Hybrid V. Vavilov is Hybrid VII. I lost Vavilov to fireblight. V is a very good pear. So far, there has been no blight after 10 years and three epidemics.
Here is what Joseph Postman wrote in his Curator’s Choice Note.
“Five selections of the cross Rousselet Shtutgartskii x Dr. J. Gujo were received in 1968 from the USSR Vavilov Institute in Leningrad. All five selections have crunchy, attractive, pyriform shaped fruit that ripen in August and September. Selection VII is the most attractive, with red blushed and speckled fruit similar in coloring to
Forelle. Tree is disease resistant and cold hardy.”
Have you looked at Ubileen? A little later than Klementinka - much larger. Kementenka x Clapp’s Favorite. Same Bulgarian breeding, I think.
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Sorry to report that Vavilov failed here- no vigor, failure to thrive, removed.
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