If i was forced to bet money it would be on ayers. After enough experience we just know a pear when we see it. That is not to say i know every pear. Many pears out there people ask us about we made widely available to everyone. Pears like douglas i requested scion from usda grin. I grow it here in Kansas and when it did well i recommended it to the @39thparallel nursery who lives in douglas county Kansas just a few miles where the pear originally grew. Naturally my pears need pruned and why not give scion wood to Mike. Mike works hard getting rare types to the public. Now everyone can grow an ayers, douglas, lazy j, duchess d’ angoulme, clara frijs. Among our circles a harrow delight or clarks small yellow is as common as a bartlett. We all love pears and all contribute to our love of pears. Seeing an ayers is like some people feel when they see a grown child. It is a picture of one of our own out there. Dr. Natelson in Texas preserved many of those southern pears and sent them to the USDA. We requested them from the usda. Im trying to find the best pears for Kansas orchards. I have kissed a lot of pears or maybe i should say frogs to find pears like ayers. Ayers was in no danger of dissappearing without us. Pears like leona and charles harris absolutely are in danger and someone like me needed to grow them in zone 6 to prove it could be done. The pears are starting to be more widely known. Tenn on the other hand is the sibling of ayers. Not many know much about it. I like it but the flavor is more likely to be off than even.ayers. when these pears are great they are really good. When they are bad they are real bad. It depends on weather , soil and other factors. @Fusion_power is starting to grow a few of these out now. I have grown hundreds and hundreds of pears through the years. I dont think i have tried a thousand types but higher hundreds is possible. Im fortunate i have hundreds of trees now. I can quickly change a few over and try something new. @39thparallel and i sometimes get together and swap a hundred scions of different types in our own private scion exchange. When we leave we both have to many new types to know what to do with them. We are working on growing rare types of pears now no one has even heard of like estella. We will do our best to get that one out there soon. Everyone forgot what it was , who grew it , where it came from etc. .We will be very fortunate if we can rescue that pear before it went extint like other sibling pears did from that collection.
2 Likes