Received permission from a couple of land owners to top work pears! This should be fun since these are 30’ + pears. Can’t wait to put my saw to them. 2 years from now there will be pears to throw at the moon. It’s not gorilla grafting if you ask first. I don’t have many scions left to spare but I know where they are going.
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Did they give you permission to take the pears from them too?
What’s wrong with the existing trees other than them being way too large? Do they produce good fruit?
I don’t need anymore pears or fruit but yes if I want some that would be no problem.
Speedster,
They are worthless callery pears. I’m grafting them to help them out and to make some worthless trees valuable. People might still be eating those in 100 years.
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In my area most open fields are just packed with Callery pears. As I go by these fields I can’t help it, my mind turns to envisioning top-working them over to desirable pears.
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That’s exactly how I felt so I decided to do something about it.
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It would be nice if you could buy a few acres of unmanaged land full of big callery pear trees on the cheap.
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Clark, you’re gonna turn KS from corn to pear belt 
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I’m going to try to turn it into the pear belt. lol
The City I work for has a park just full of Callery pear trees that were planted before my time. I would love to top work some or all of them into fruiting trees, but I fear the public (and city council) would get upset about the appearance of the trees between the time I cut them down to 2-4 until they grow back to a good size. They are featured prominently in the landscaping of the park and their high visability would make people notice and cringe if they got cut (and most people don’t know what awful trees they are). But just like some of you, I drive by and think about it a lot. One of these days I’m going to just go for it and at least do one or two.
.
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I suspect gorilla grafters might really sometimes be high ranking city employees secretly converting a few callery to fruiting pears.
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That makes sense. The original post did not specify callery. I assumed they were old euro varieties.
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