Maxine has a good number of pears for a smaller tree (10 -12 '). I will document well with photos and information for you. It came through the storm fine. Storms are a way of life here and there will be more always long after me. The damage they do is never worse than the good they do. It brought me a inch and a half of much needed rain. i lost a few grafts and trees for the good of everything else so it was worth it. It was a good trade off!
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Harrow delight is a very productive pear developed by the famous Harrow Experiment station. Im not sure what the Canadians are doing different when it comes to breeding fruit but from cherries to pears they do it much better than anyone else! Im told th haskap program is their main focus now and wildly successful! Below are a few pictures of Harrow delight! The fruit industry is doing better and developments such as the prime ark series coming out of Arkansas are getting better all the time. Pears like these just take 2-3 years to produce which is more like a peach than a pear! Pears are not just for your heirs anymore! None of my pears were sprayed this year besides clapps favorite which i sprayed with copper.
Clapps favorite is a fire blight sensitive pear i grow strictly because of the great flavor. Ive grow these trees for 24 years now. Having lost the original tree to fireblight these are grafts of the original i did higher up on callery. The hopes are the roots wont be killed this time. Im completely prepared when i grow these trees they can get fireblight strikes and killed to the ground but in the meantime i get to eat the pear i want! Clapps favorite pears are shown below. They are highly productive. Dont leave these on tbe tree to long they are subject to internal breakdown quickly. They are hard to judge when ripe so i planted these close to house so i can check often.
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Here in Dallas, my Harrow Delight and Harvest Queen are half the size they were 3 months ago, as I keep cutting out fireblight.
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@subdood_ky_z6b
As promised here are pictures of maxine
Seckle photos are below
Clara frijs shown below
Ya li below (foliage issues with this one in Kansas)
Duchess d’ Angoulme ( very prone to rust same as douglas and kieffer type pears)
Potomac below
Old fashioned Kieffer ( not improved) on ohxf333 below
Magness below
Korean Giant below
Warren below
Karls favorite aka Ewart
If someone needs a photo of another pear please let me know as there are many i dont plan to post until harvest since i have before or someone else did such as menie, dana hovey, ayers, altoona, harrow sweet, improved kieffer, ts hardy etc… pictures are useful but exspensive in terms of space on the server. I want to document pears to help people but while trying not to create redundant documentation. I have plenty of new projects going to document!
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@Bhawkins
Dallas is a tough environment. Ayers, leona, etc. Are all I would try there. Sorry to hear your having fireblight trouble. It looks like i did not already post these as i had thought.The storms continue so some photos are dark. I think the others besides these have been posted.
Dana hovey below
Menie below
Altoona (@Chikn aka saved a pear)
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The heat has been here for about a week and oppressive humidity has been its companion! The pears love the weather! This is one of my rows of pears at a distance. The branches are bending already from the heavy load of pears they have!
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My Colette is on it’s second bloom. I have to wonder if this characteristic is going to make this tree a fire blight magnet. It would stink to find that out after 9 years…
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Mostly just lots of rain and sunlight! The heavy rain this year in my part of the country seems to be ballooning them up fast. I don’t fertilize much, mostly compost in the spring and a little 10-10-10 when I’m fertilizing my berries.
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Do you thin your pears? I see there’s 3 in a cluster of the drippin honey.
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@Sheri yes, I thin most clusters to 1 fruit or remove them all together if they are too close to one another. However, this Drippin’ Honey pear was only planted last year and had a total of 5 flower clusters this year. A hail storm came and destroyed 2 of those clusters so I didn’t thin the remaining 3 so severely so I could get a taste this year. Even with 3 pears there, they are sizing up very well since the tree has so few fruit to support.
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Hi Andy, what was your experience with the Colette this year? I have a small grafted Colette, it’s been very slow to grow…although that is somewhat okay because the tree is in sort of nursery/holding location. But still, thus far it has grown but a few inches each of the last 2 summers. Hopefully it will grow better when in full day sun. Did the successive flowering result in FB? I was under the impression Colette is supposed to be fairly resistant, but given the perpetual blooming it seems to just open the window for infection. Unless it truly is resistant.
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The tree dropped fruit on all but one branch this spring, and by mid summer I had to begin pruning off the last branch with fruit on it due to fire blight. I eventually had to prune two branches back far enough that the last fruit was pruned off. The tree did set more blooms in July, didn’t set any fruit from those blooms, but also did not have further problems with FB. The tree as a whole seems healthy and I was able to avoid systemic FB. Now that it’s fruiting I’ll try spraying more preventative sprays and see how it does next year. My Colette is next to a Clapps and has more vigor than the Clapps, but both trees are growing well to the point of circling branches. I actually moved both trees 3-4 years ago to get them into more sunlight. In my nursery bed it seems that Nova and Ayers are the most vigorous pears.
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@mamuang those are ayers. They are not ripe yet even though they needed picked. Let them turn very yellow and soft inside. When they are ripe they are juicy, meting and sweet. The skin is a little course and can have occasional grit. I think you will like them. They are not likely to have internal break down like so many pears.
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Thank you, Clark. I was worried since I have a couple of mislabeled ones.
Bad news about Magness. I wrapped them in a dark window screen so it was hard to see the color change. Today, they looked like they dropped. So, opened the screen. All but one were way overripe. The last one was salvageable. Texture was smooth, melting but it was mot very sweet.
So disappointed. Two years in a row with no Magness. Squirrels last year and waiting too long this year. At least, I have some idea when Magness was supposed to ripen here, about 10 days ago.
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Very odd magness is not ripe here yet.
Mine may not be Magness. It was a graft from swapping several years ago.
The Magness pears I ate from the Cornell store last year were excellent.
I really should me more careful about swapping scionwood. After waiting for 3-4 years, finding out the varieties are not correct is very disappointing.
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