Is 16% where a good tasting pear should be it? Thanks
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Hi. It was very good, sweet and crunchy. First and only fruit of a grafted scion last year. I love it.
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Thanks, I’m going to test my Dripping Honey this morning.
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Any fruit above 12 brix is going to be sweet. Above 18 brix is going to be syrupy sweet. Above 24 brix is going to be like eating honey. Caveat that fruit flavor also has to be acceptable.
For comparison, most tomatoes brix about 4 to 6. Sungold regularly gets to 12.
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This Qtee pear was very sweet but aromatic too. My mouth got sweet for some time. Really good.
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Thanks
This is the start of my pear season. There are a few more DH that are at a similar stage of ripeness. The Korean Giants are getting larger now and they work well to extend my pear season into another couple of months. As far as I know Korean Giant is the latest Asian pear to ripen but I could be wrong.
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Both of my potomacs look terrible. I had to prune a lot off this one a couple years back and left a couple limbs in questionable locations. I got great unmarred fruit about 4 years ago, but fruit has been scabby, corkey, and/or ugly ever since. I have been thinking about cutting this one down. It’s too close to other trees anyway. Otherwise I may just do a severe pruning and see what happens.
Even if you don’t enlarge the photo, you can tell the tree doesn’t have anywhere near a normal leaf set. If you enlarge it, you can see normal looking leaves have been chewed on, which is not a big deal, but there are also a lot of curled, shirveled leaves.
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The scion wood quality point is really interesting. I always assumed poor growth was down to my soil or rootstock choice but it makes sense that virus-infected wood would explain why some grafts just look sad no matter what you do. How do you tell the difference between a tree that needs more time and one that is genuinely compromised from the start?
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I don’t think you can tell if your scionwood is virus free (unless it’s apple and been through the Geneva virus removal program) I’m not even sure we know much about pear viruses.
It could also be a small mutation or variation occurred and your trees are grafted from that.
There was a whole discussion a while back about sekel. There seem to be enough differences in health, vigor, and fireblight resistance that people think they might not have the “real” sekel. Or maybe there’s some that has an unknown virus that makes it weaker.
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My opinion is that we only know a small amount about disease resistance such as fireblight. I have added several varieties of pears through the years that was thought to be resistant to FB. As of now I haven’t seen any of them that didn’t get at least a little during the bloom stage. Some are worst than others. My method is to keep my limbs low where I can remove small infected areas before it moves into larger wood. This method probably isn’t practical for most people because I walk through each morning looking for FB areas during the peak times.
I have looked over this tree several times trying to decide what I would do with it if it were mine. To me it looks salvageable with some strategic pruning and care. It takes a few years of time to replace a tree of this size. At my location stinkbugs damage some of my pears and they leave hard and sometimes puffy areas in the fruit. I bag my pears which helps but doesn’t completely eliminate it. Just a few of my opinions.
Yes, I am not thrilled with the idea of starting over. It actually looks better now than when it was nearly defoliated a couple months ago. I think I am dealing with San Jose scale, stink bugs, and pear scab. Maybe I just need to stick it out another year.
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I’ll see all these pictures of these beautiful pears . After six years fighting everything form fireblight, crows raccoons and insects
I’m finally going to be able to harvest some pears , however, there’s no other way to describe these orient pears other than large Butt ugly pears . However it is better than nothing
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Your Orient pears look good. I had my first success many years ago with this pear. It can be surprisingly good if you are okay with a little harder texture and slightly less brix.
I’m not sure what the damage from a codling moth looks like but a couple of the sites look a little like curculio.
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