Seckel Pear Vigor and Habit

Seemed like both. Very vigorous.

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@SpokanePeach

Simply don’t understand that as it’s the opposite of my experience here. Are you sure it was a true seckle? Here at my orchard I grafted many trees to callery including seckle. All other trees doubled the growth of seckle. Clara frijs, Maxine, Kieffer, Duchess d’ angoulme all 2x as large. Grafted new pears years later that outgrew seckle again pineapple pear, ya li, Charles Harris, abate feel, Korean Giant to name a few. Went so far with seckle as to do a sub experiment where one seckle is on oxf87 and the other on callery. The ohxf87 is smaller. The scion wood for my seckle came from Corvallis . Perhaps it grows better with competition grafted on the same tree! In my opinion Moonglow, Comice, Anjou are not good growers here either. When I grafted those 3 on my multigrafts I’ve had to cutback the parent wood off them 3 or 4 times removed half of the grafts due to diseases.

Maybe 8 or 9 years old, 7 feet tall. Cattle panel cage is 4 feet per side.

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I’ve noticed the same kind of thick dense growth from my Wolden Seckel, it’s on OHxF 333, I only had 2 of the 15 grafts I did survive. I’ve since changed my approach to grafting where I was doing bench grafting I’ve now switched to growing up the root stock one season then grafting them in the nursery.

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Very nice branching. Did you use limb spreaders?

I don’t think I used limb spreaders, and I don’t think I did any limb training, just pruning.

As it gets bigger I’ll probably thin some of the lower scaffolds off. My intention is to remove the cage in a couple of years with most of the canopy outside of deer browse.

I posted the image to illustrate that it has a nice growth habit. It’s been super easy to manage the shape, open, good crotch angles, and plenty of fruit buds.

The pruning has been thinning, and heading to outward facing buds.

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@murky

Great looking tree. That’s typical growth for seckle. Great looking petite trees.

I’m not sure what to tell you, fruit sure looked like Seckel. Small, sweet, lots of red to the skin. In fact all 4 varieties seemed to produce true to type while they produced.

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Considering that with any fruit some cultivars will be more or less compatible with a given rootstock than others. I wonder if ‘Seckel’ had a higher degree of compatibility than the others causing the rootstock to favor ‘Seckel’ grafts over the others when given a choice.

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@SpokanePeach

I’m shocked by your experience with seckle but not doubting or discounting your experience. There are so many factors that are different I would hardly know where to begin describing them. Certainly your area has higher rainfall, less wind, the trees that you grafted to don’t like this climate very well overall. Perhaps given those factors your account makes perfect sense. Comice is not a strong grower here and seckle is stronger as an example. In my location many times as I passed seckle trees my eyebrows were raised by it not growing but it is growing better than comice.

@JohannsGarden

Absolutely agree it’s possible and have alluded to similar concepts that your bringing up

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It’s a well maintained fruit tree, sounds like you’ve done your homework with this beautiful Seckel Pear. I noticed a good amount of fruit spurs as well. Did you say what rootstock it was on?

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I consider Seckel moderately vigorous if it isn’t plagued by psyla. What is unusual about it for a pear is its naturally spreading form. In the northeast, its relatively high brix is useful- pears can be sugar challenged here.

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This my 1st post here, so pardon me if I screw up?

In general, I do not like most pear fruit.
But, but, I do like them little Seckel kind.
I plan to buy/plant 1-2 of them this spring …

-George (gorgi)

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@gorgi

Once your growing your own seckle you might find there are other pears you like. The problem has always been most people have never tried a fraction of the pear varities. I’m glad you found seckle and decided to try it. My suspicion is you would like Harrow sweet and others.

Mine is on seedling p. comunis and is medium vigor, dense branch growth as others have described. Crotch angles angles are less acute than most pears, but not what I’d call spreading. I thin out the side shoots and reduce scaffolds from the trunk to open it up. Great eating pear!

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By the standards of pear trees in general, Seckel is most certainly spreading, IMO, and I get the form I want without much branch spreading with this variety. I am talking about the tree within the context of the species and pears tend to be columnar.

Can you name a single pear variety with a more spreading habit? Maybe you are speaking from a general landscaping perspective.

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Buerre Giffard, Staceyvill, Magness and a few others all have a more open spreading habit in my yard

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Magness does have a similar spreading habit, Never heard of Staceyville or grown Giffard. Magness is a great pear here once it finally gets around to bearing fruit, which can take a very long time. It is surprising that a pear with such a spreading habit is the opposite of precocious. I’ve never gotten a single pear from one of my nursery trees and cut down the only Mag in my orchard after becoming impatient from 8 years in waiting. I do have a tree I manage that wasn’t too old when it came into production. It had grown in a pot for 3 years and the constriction seems to have forced it to fruit earlier than if left in the ground. Only took 7 years!

It is much more psyla and scab resistant than Seckel. The funny thing is that Seckel can be fine for years before having those problems.

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@alan @JesseinMaine

Since seckle is one of the parents of Magness and Warren I’m not surprised they share many similarities. The size definately came from comice. Giant seckle

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Sadly you missed bare root buying season for the most part unless you really got lucky and someone still has it. Otherwise you have to buy a potted tree which is much more costly. Most pears in store are so so. Most who have tasted pears from the store have never had something like a Comice, Warren or Magness pear that will taste like brown sugar for example. I had those pear varieties I mentioned and I felt disappointed going back to the Bartlett pears you get at the store.