The 2017 harvest is beginning! These pears easily break off with a tilt test. We have a large rain storm coming in tomorrow and the winds would have dropped these pears. Tree number 1 is a 8 year old improved kieffer. The tree is light this year due to dicey spring weather. Total harvest is 3/4 5 gallon bucket of pears. Loss to varmints, insects, birds, disease = 0. Total Spray used = 0. Typically these pears ripen later than others not ripe yet so we cannot always go by the calendar.
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Could be the heat. Your fruit is way ahead of me. Mine are small, very green and solid two month away from ripening
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Pear tree #2 is an improved kieffer that is 7 years old. This tree is in a wet spot in poor soil but yield was nearly identical to pear #1. I dropped plenty due to getting tangled up in the autum olive bush I let grow at the bottom as a companion to fix nitrogen. This tree received no spray but I did find 2 pears showing some type of a rot disease damage. No pears were lost to animals , birds, insects etc. .total yield was 3/4 of a 5 gallon bucket.
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Mamuang,
Your probably right. These pears do not have the size they typically do so it does indicate the heat prematurely ripened these.
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Thanks for posting the pictures of the Improved Kieffer. I see similarities to my Kieffer and I’m back wondering which one I have. Not sure what effect our locations would have on ripening. At this stage yours looks smoother but that might just be from maturing earlier. I would take a picture of my Kieffer for comparison but they are coated with surround. If it’s ok with you I will later post a picture for you to compare. I’m assuming that you don’t have any of the original Kieffer fruit for comparison. It would be nice to have a better indication as to which one I have.
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@39thparallel can help us out with that original kieffer fruit but it won’t be mature for awhile yet. It’s leaves buds etc. are very nearly identical to the improved type I grow. His kieffer pear is loaded every year. They are so close I would be hard pressed to tell them apart accept by ripening time. The fruit is a little different and I’m partial to improved kieffer but that may be because I eat lots of them every year. You can see photos of his orchard including kieffer pears here The 39th Parallel Nursery and Orchard!. He does do custom grafting for people if they want a rare pear or apple in his nursery. The kieffer pears are the first pictures I took in that post. This is what the original kieffer looks like and they are very difficult to tell apart. http://growingfruit-images.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/3X/1/8/1853033bf1b231d220d6631249d0e2979c07cfcd.jpg
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This is pear #3 which is the parent pear to the other two you’ve seen in the previous posts. This improved kieffer is at least 16 years old. This pear was never sprayed and shows no sign of fruit lost due to insects, diseases, animals, birds, etc. . Like all the pears it’s very light on fruit this year. The total yield was 1 1/2 5 gallon buckets of pears.
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I picked two more small 6 year old improved kieffers growing in poor clay soil that had a dozen or so pears on them. This finished my improved kieffer harvest for the year and I already gave a bunch away. Here is what I currently have left.
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What is a tilt test? It is so hard to know when to pick pears.
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Tilt the pear up and when the stem snaps off it’s ripe. I pick my pears without losing any using that trick.
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I was looking over my Kieffer pears yesterday and I didn’t see any insect damage. My Orient had some damage but still had a good crop. For the person that wants to keep life simple this would be the tree to go with. Not sure but I think that it is self pollinating at my location. I’m estimating that I will have 40-50 ready to pick soon. These weren’t bagged but I have sprayed with surround. Bill
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Most of my Euro pears (Bosc, Orcas, Comice and pear combo) are only 2nd or 3rd leaf so little or no fruit. My Asian pears are also young but have fruited far more even as first year trees.
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Here are pictures of my pear that I cannot identify. From the posts above this looks like it might be Orient. It is ripe about 2 weeks after Bartlett here. It has very buttery and delicious flesh when ripe, but the peel is like leather and so it is an obstacle unless they are peeled. It does not get Fire Blight.
We usually pick pears by pressure test and the test we did on Thursday said they needed another week, but the did snap when I tilted them as clarkinks mentioned above.
One expert told me they are Moonglow, but the ripening period is wrong. Do you all think it could be Orient? Or if not that, then what?
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Red blushing bartlett are beginning to color up. These so called Bartlett’s are somewhat resistant to fireblight. They do ripen to perfection on the tree as few pears do. These pears turn yellow once they are ripe and do not rot internally.
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The outside to me looks like the Orient but smooth butter inside doesn’t match. My Moonglow peel looks smoother than the pear in your picture but is smooth on the inside. I Took a long time to say I don’t know. If in doubt ask @clarkinks.
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Can you show us some pictures of the tree? Leaves and bark will help.
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I was going to ask you about bark in figuring out culivars. My anti-Kieffer/orient? has a completely different looking bark to the orient/other box store pear so… who knows what trees I have!!! Don’t you really love these guessing games???
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Here are the two trees. They are between 30 and 50 years old and were almost dead when I moved in 23 years ago but I brought them back.
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Katy,
kieffer pears have that glossy foliage and the new growth is that green willowy looking bark. The problem is most fire blight resistant pears are bred from kieffer. With so many fire light resistant hybrids there is an awful lot of kieffers that really are not kieffer. Here is an example of the typical foliage.
Pears such as Duchess have that foliage also and other similar characteristics. Bloom time, fruit, and bark are a few ways we can try and identify them out of the thousands of pears out there. European pears for the most part look completely different and have thinner smaller leaves. Hopefully one day I can write it all down and take pictures but I’ve not found the time yet.
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Great looking trees. Try and get a close up of the leaves and bark if possible. By what I can tell so far it does look like a fireblight resistant hybrid. There are tons of them and not all of the information is well documented.
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