This is my first attempt to develop 4 espaliered pear trees in the backyard. European pears: (1) Bosc (2) Harrow Delight; Asian Pears: (1) Hosui (2) Shinseiki…
The trellis and wires are set. Trees planted and pruned! It has been a month. They are pushing buds from last week.
4-Tier Trellis Wires:
European Pears:
Asian Pears:
Any suggestions and advice will be greatly appreciated!
Will keep updating this thread with progress…
Don’t go for your second tier until the first one is develloped. Keep the leader pinched to 4 inches.
Do you know what rootstock they are on? Asian Pears do great as espalier trees. They Euro pears have more vigor and can be a little more challenging to manage even on OHxF 333. Why did you opt to grow them in containers?
@39thparallel The Asian Pear rootstock is Callery, and the European Pear rootstock is OHxF333. Those are not containers, they are bottomless. We needed to amend the soil (with compost) in the planting area…that is why I used those raised-bed-like borders.
i don’t think the containers/raised beds are needed. I would plant them at ground level next winter. (much easier to replant now they are still young.)
Unless you have like 0 draining? Are you on concrete or hardrock?
The rootstocks your using are quite vigorous.
I’m on another continent. So my growing climate is likely different. But i would use dwarfing quince rootstocks. And a pear seedling or pyrodwarf (similar to OHxF 333) for the asian pear for espaliers.
How wide/high do you want your espalier to be? It’s best to match your rootstock/tree amount to that. Or you wil have to summer prune (a lot) next to winter pruning.
Nice. You clearly but some thought into the planting which will pay dividends in the future. We get about 5 times as much rain as you but that equals 5x the pest and disease pressure. I would not mind trading some pest and disease for soil amendments and irrigation. I’m also curious of the spacing. Most of my pear espaliers are around 16’ apart on a 6’, 3 wire trellis
@oscar they are not containers, just edges. I have concrete slabs nearby, and these areas have a bit of drainage problems…
For European Pear, I am using OHxF 333, but could not find any Asian Pears with dwarfing rootstock in my nearby nurseries. We are pretty much dependent on Dave Wilson for trees.
These espaliers would be about 8 feet by 8 feet.
I plan to do a lot of summer pruning. Hope to manage 'em as much as possible.
@39thparallel I do not have that much space near my house, so these espaliers will be around 8 feet wide, planning to keep them at 8 feet high.
Hi @inspireranch
I am also a beginner on espalier pears. I have 2 (moonglow) and they are in 3d year. Would it be ok to post into this thread? I am still pretty new to this forum and have seen other “espalier pear project” threads. Your stage is closest to mine.
Thanks!
I didn’t have any problem growing multiple tiers at the same time on my pear espalier. I would let the ends of the tier grow toward vertical for a couple feet before tying it down. You can have a little control on its growth habit by how much you let the tier grow upwards before tying it down. I don’t know the rootstock on my pears. They are Bartlett from a box store with Asian pears and Clark’s Little yellow grafts.
@Sparty Beautiful job! Mine has not produced fruit even though it is 4 years old. I suspect it is the way I prune it. How do you prune yours?
I’m not getting a lot of fruit yet, either. They are about 6 years old. The Asian pear grafts fruit d right away, though.
Great use of the southern
exposure!
How do you prune it?
@Sparty they are nice looking espaliers…I hope my ones grow like that over the next couple of years.
To be honest, I treat them poorly. I tried techniques where you leave some horizontal branches off the main scaffolds, tie down the vertical growth, and some other methods. I’ve also simple ripped the vertical growth off by hand when I walk by. They are beasts that seemingly can’t be hurt. I usually just end up pruning everything back so the scaffolds are really defined and it looks nice. It’s more for display and decoration than production. I think it is slowly producing more each year, though.
I let the pears go wild with vertical shoots this year and tried to tie most of them down to horizontal. Some of the shoots look like they pushed fruiting spurs. I trimmed everything back yesterday, trying to leave some spurs. Notice the lower right branch. I grew this all the way out to the end, up a few rows, and back toward the tree. I did this to fill in an upper scaffold that stunted out after grafting Korean Giant to it. The graft went straight to fruiting and didn’t want to grow much farther.
I love that, a great use of that space.
