As a child i looked longingly at the Kieffer my neighbors had because it was ridiculously productive. I thought a man with such a tree would never want for pears. Every year it produces, diseases don’t kill it, they can well, they store well, they dont need spraying, what is not to like? Here is one that is 5 years old on ohxf333. This should be the first tree planted in anyones food forest. Well as years passed by the little boy turned into a man. The dream of kieffer turned into the smile of a senior aged man now. I wouldn’t say i dont appreciate kieffer, rather learned there is more than one type of pear in this world. Wisdom comes with age and i planted a dozen of them for the years of poor fruit set. The location where this one grows would not grow grass when i moved here. I leave it grown up in this spot and the raspberries , elderberries, and grass are free to grow as they want. The tree is about 10 foot tall growing in poor soil. Kieffer is meant for cooking and canning. Dont misunderstand this as an endorsement for this being a fresh eating pear. Sure i eat some fresh but they are meant for storage.
My wife makes pear preserves from kieffer and they are delicious. Whole family loves them.
If lucky… my two keifer trees (kiefer and improved kiefer) may start producing next year. I hope so. Next year will be year 4 for them.
Once stored in the basement for a week or two… they yellow up… and soften up… and we eat them fresh as long as they will last.
I need to learn other ways to preserve them…
Anyone ever tried dehydration ?
When you can them … is that water bath… or pressure canning ? We can do either one.
You can them in a light syrup ?
We seriously minimize sugar here… any good low sugar pear canning recipies out there ?
I will check the fruit in your kitchen section and see if I can find any recipies for canned pears.
TNHunter
Found this
I like adding somd ginger or cinnamon to some and using unsweetened juice to can some fruit. Never did pears though
We have canned pears in Martinelli’s Apple Juice before. It works really well for a different taste/texture combo.
Kieffer does well in Maine too. There are a couple roadside trees the next town over I pick from with owners permission- they make more pears than they can use! Annually productive and very clean fruit for not being managed in any way. Decent fresh eating when they soften and yellow a bit, we use them for all kinds of cooking and processing. 3 or 4 in my morning oatmeal is a great start to the day.
I summer pruned my two kiefer pear trees late August…
In the orchard this week… found one cluster of pear blossoms.
BloomIng mid October.
Hopefully they will bloom again next spring.
TNHunter
My wife and I started drying pears this year. In general, people like the dried pears better than the fresh ones. As usual, drying concentrates sweetness and flavor. Other advantages: Dried pears take up a tiny fraction of the space. Well dried pears can be stored without refrigeration.
@jrd51 … i have stored dehydrated figs in a mason jar in the fridge for 3-4 months and they remained the same tasted great the entire time.
I have a vacuum sealer for mason jars… and no doubt that would increase the storage time.
If I had multiple quart or half gallon jars I would leave one (the one we are currently eating from) unsealed… but would vaccum seal the others. Vaccum sealing mason jars… will greatly increase the good storage time.
TNHunter
@TNHunter – We seem to think alike. I’ve dehydrated figs for many years but never wanted to remove all moisture, which makes them too hard. But given the residual moisture, I stored them in a freezer. When targeted for consumption, I’d move them to a fridge. Even so, I find that there’s a sweet spot (!) – dry but not hard – where they can be stored at room temperature for months.
Just recently, my wife suggested vacuum sealing mason jars. We’ve been using this method to preserve some fresh herbs (e.g., anise hyssop) as well as dried apples and pears. Like you, we figured that it would increase the good storage time.
What do you use for drying your pears?
Grandma has it figured out…
No Sugar
With Sugar
My wife’s pear preserves… we made these from some EU pears we got at Englands Orchard last fall. They turned a nice red color.
Full recipe is in the (Fruit in your Kitchen) section. This is an old standard recipe… not low sugar.
TNHunter
Kiefer also has beautiful flowers that show before leaves disturb the picture, at least pears I identify as Kiefer do. One next door to me must be about 80’ tall and at least a century old. It is very beautiful when in full bloom and bears heavy crops of medium sized, late ripening fruit that is edible when fully ripe but not sweet enough for spoiled human palates that have been raised on the likes of Bosc. Once they are dead ripe, yellow jackets adore the fruit that breaks some when dropping from trees, as is happening on a tree at a site I’m doing a huge installation at now. This one is likely a seedling as may be the one next to me, but Kiefer is the pear strain that endured the fire blight epidemics here last century. Are we talking about a pear “variety” that is mostly seedlings now but carrying similar characteristics of each other or are you talking about a clone? With the old trees around here, I can’t be sure what I’m looking at, clone or seedling, but very similar. . .
Years ago I purchased a NESCO/American Harvester Food Dehydrator and Jerky Maker. As I recall, it comes with 3 circular, stacking trays but has a capacity of ten, so I later bought the extra trays. I couldn’t live without the extras. This has worked very well for pretty much everything I’ve tried – figs, apples, pears, mushrooms, herbs, etc.
Later some friends stopped using their Sedona Food Dehydrator so they gave it to us. This is a boxy appliance that looks like a small microwave; it has 10 rectangular trays that insert like shelves. It has worked very well too.
Both dehydrators permit a range of temperatures though I do most at 135 F. The main advantage of the Sedona is that it has a timer so it shuts off automatically; the NESCO runs until it is unplugged.
So Kieffer/Kiefer would not be among top fresh eating pears, right? A friend already planted two and now deciding if I should graft over to e.g. Potomac, Magness. Building a small farm orchard, no spray, no ladder.
I’m not 100% sure if my brother’s is truly a Kieffer but assuming that’s what he has, it is truly a bulletproof no spray tree for central PA too. We got a late frost that killed so much fruit a bunch of orchards closed for the year due to lack of fruit but that pear tree was still at least 50% loaded. Fruit hangs a very long time, it still has some on it now. The skin is pretty thick and fresh off the tree they are rock hard but they soften up and taste legitimately good, tasting much closer to a good pear. There are likely better options for taste, my Comice pears taste quite a bit better, but it also failed to produce this year while that Kieffer doesn’t struggle with anything. I’m thinking of grafting Kieffer just to have the robustness of a true homesteading tree.
While pear snobs often denigrate Kieffer as barely edible, growing up in the Deep South, and even up here in The Frigid Northland of southern Kentucky, it is the one that you’ll most frequently see, untended, at rural farmsteads, loaded with fruit to the point of limb-breakage, often with multiple arrested fire light lesions throughout the canopy. Having grown up with access now not to Kieffer - and an occasional Orient or Pineapple pear - it is what I expect - and desire - in a pear: firm, juicy, sweet, and, yes, gritty!
I suspect that cockroaches and Kieffer will survive The Apocalypse…
Kieffer did not survive here. Another victim of fireblight like Moonglow. Only Southern Bartlett and sand pear survive with 20th Century.
Kieffer pears bloom early.
My Kiefer and Improved Kiefer pear trees bloomed for the first time this spring (after summer pruning prev fall).
We got a frost on March 16… 29F … they had already set tiny fruit… it all dropped.
Hope that does not repeat most springs.
TNHunter
We are in very different climates but my brother’s tree is very mature (it was already very old 20 years ago) and it blooms over a pretty extended duration which allows it to escape even late frosts, at least in central PA. In the last decade, it has never had 100% loss of fruit. Hopefully as it gets older for you, it extends the bloom quantity and timeline over a longer period.