Any pear growers have opinions on these trees for 8A Mediterranean? Ease of growing, potential problems and fruit quality?
Buerre Hardy
Packham’s Triumph
Louise Bonne d’Jersey
Warren
Magness
Abate Fetel
Shinko Asian Pear
20th Century Asian Pear
Thank you!
Sarah
Yes, 40 miles up the mountain from Redding, at 4200 ft elevation.
Is that based on bloom time?
It is more based on disease tolerance than anything else. Warren tolerates heat and disease better than the others listed. Magness is a close second since they are siblings. You might enjoy this thread Southern Pears
The comment here was based on a wrong understanding of the sort of climate you are dealing with. See my comment below.
Scratch what I just said above. I just looked at where Redding is on the map. My expectation is that you are in a fairly cold climate rather than a warm one. Generally Northern California should be a great pear growing region. However, I don’t have a good sense of what 4,000 ft above sea level would mean in Northern California. Your biggest issue may be late frosts on account of your elevation. So it may be smart to go with late blooming varieties on account of that. I would be interested to know what your seasonal low temperatures are like given your elevation. If you are in Hardiness Zone 5 or lower, then the question becomes about what varieties are cold hardy enough.
I figured the comments were based on a location error - I am in zone 8A and you are right, I am capable of experiencing late frosts. To make matters worse, the weather predictions never seem to be right, so hard to prepare for the unknown.
Last year it snowed on November 1st and felt like Winter lasted most of the year. This year, still no snow yet but we did get a dip to 22f one day. I am glad this winter seems milder so far.
Lowest we saw was 11f I think, last winter. My vehicle said it was 9f but that might have been including wind chill. We have dry summers that do not hit triple digits but sometimes in the 90’s.
Won’t pears bloom at the different times, depending on climate? So if I have a short growing season, I might just have all pears blooming closer together?
Recently I had persimmon tender leaves and walnut tender leaves killed at the sudden dip to 22f but the branches seem fine. Oddly enough, the only tree that seems like it isn’t going into dormancy is the flavor supreme pluot. It has green leaves all over it, weird.
My Flavor Grenade, Flavor Punch, and Flavor Supreme have lost only 1/4 of their leaves They are always the last to lose leaves and sometimes hold on to them till new leaves appear in spring!
I’m I zone 8a/8b.
My flavor grenade has no leaves right now. I have never tried flavor punch, have you gotten fruit yet? Have you tried flavor supreme fruit yet? I have not tried that one either.
My trees are all newer, I have just gotten started. So no fruit yet - but I did try flavor grenade at a farmers market and I love it.
The two pluots I have are flavor supreme and flavor grenade.
Despite profuse bloom, I’ve only had 1 or 2 fruit from my 6 year old trees. And, sadly, they tasted nothing like store-bought…more like regular Asian plums. I keep adding plum varieties hoping for better pollination!
I am so sorry to hear that! Were they really small trees when you got them? What rootstock are they on? I will report what happens with me as time goes on, maybe it is just because those are the “practice” first fruits for your trees.
They were branched whips on Myro29C when I got them from Raintree.
I trained them to espalier and they took off in second year-very vigorous growers.
Check out a posting by @z0r May’21 re: pluot pollination
In general, Burgundy, Satsuma, Santa Rosa, Splash, Dapple Dandy, and Mariposa are all potential pollinizers. When your pluots bloom, check out neighbors or nurseries for Asian plums blooming at same time.
Yes, the later the spring the later all varieties of pears or anything else will bloom. But relative to each other some pears bloom later than others. The reason this may make a bigger difference at a higher elevation or in a more inland location is that fluctuations in temperatures are greater the further you are from water. So my fruit trees in Eastern Georgia, 50 miles from Atlantic, get yacked by a late frost less often further south and west in Georgia. It’s all about the moderating influence of the Atlantic on temperature variegations during the shoulder seasons. One of the reason why the west cost is better for fruit production than the east cost is because prevailing wends in the US go from west to east. You simply have fewer and smaller temperature spike when you air is coming off of a body of water. But I’m not sure how much that helps when you are at 4,000 ft.
On the subject of plums and pollination: My experience implies that plum cultivars, which are complex hybrids, have pretty weak pollen. I find that pollination is much better when you have a compatible wild type native species blooming with the Asian type hybrids. Here in SE Georgia that means wild type chickasaw plum, P. angustifolia, but that blooms too early to be useful for pollinizing later blooming cultivars. In California you would have the option of using P. americana and P. nigra which are both later blooming. Anyway, none hybrid pollen is just better than hybrid pollen for some reason. If you can find an Asian plum that’s not a hybrid at all, it may be a better pollinizer than most cultivars which are nearly always hybrids of some sort.