Seckle is very small. They are tasty little fruits. If i was looking at buying the trees on your list i would buy both the harrows you selected and Shenendoah. They produce quickly. Seckle and harvest queen are good but may have a 5-8 year wait before they fruit. Shipova is an interspecific hybrid which is good but very susceptible to disease. Harrow sweet and harrow delight on callery will likely produce in 1-3 years. Shenendoah is larger than bartlett but the flavor is slightly off at time of picking. It is not perfect when it comes to disease which you should consider. As it sits the flavor becomes more bartlett like. Harrow sweet fruit is excellent and bartlett like. Harrow delight is very good and bartlett like. Harrows have excellent disease resistance the others are not in the same class of easy to grow pears. 25 Harrow pear varieties
Thanks again @clarkinks ! I’m planning to visit my parents next week, so I’ll try to graft the Seckel and Shenandoah onto their tree then. Even if the Seckel takes longer to bear, I just want to see what it tastes like, and I figured it would bear faster on the full-sun callery at my parents’ house than the part-shade aronia in my back yard.
Harrow pears are early bearing, delicious tasting, and incredibly easy to grow. The others dont really compare in that respect. The 2 others are good pears as well.
Years ago I lost Seckel to fire blight here in Maryland. To this day it’s the only pear I’ve lost to blight.
The fruit looks like seckle. It is not a true seckle if it is not growing in clusters. It can be a type of seckle even if it does not grow in cluseters like seckle. How big do the fruits get? This is what fruit looks like on seckle. It grows in clusters always.
It could be several types
Or
In that photo you took it looks like ayers
Oh my!
My “seckle” fruit are small, not too much bigger than golf ball sized (I didn’t thin). I have to check for clusters. My fruit definitely has a lot of white dots and red blush. I don’t think I’ve seen one without blush. Looking at your pictures, it could also be Ayers. I’ve never seen fireblight on my tree and both Seckle and Ayers are said to be firelight resistant. Both Seckle and Ayers are said to have small fruit. They seem to share similarities in many traits.
Photos and morphology of cultivars can tell us what something is not, and very rarely what something is. For the latter you need a specific kind of genomics.
Maybe in the future they will sell kits on amazon for each cultivar. You dip the test strip in fruit mash you want to test and it turns blue if it matches dna.
Until then, I’m not sure what better option exists for common folk, except to cross reference observable morphology against what is hoped to be a known example or standard.
There are currently 1000’s of pear cultivars in worldwide circulation and likewise apples, figs, and so on. What you are suggesting is impractical.
You can stop pretending to know what it is and instead be satisfied to know what it is not.
Even then do you trust Amazon to have the right DNA? Amazon is not one for quality control. I know a few reputable sellers sell plants on there but those sellers will send more per their website. Refining Fire Chiles sells on both but will include extra seeds with ordering from his website for example. Most selling plants on Amazon are scams though.
There seems to be thousands of apples (over 7000 with the USA being home to over 2000 I believe) but pears seem to be lower in cultivars than apples. I also don’t see new releases of pears like apples. Many pears being sold are very old varieties. I can’t say why.
Just speculating what an example of what future technology could shape up to be. It doesn’t have to be sold on Amazon though I share your skepticism of many Amazon products.
Not sure if I get what you mean.
I’m up to 4600 line items in the pear database. All of them so far appear to be either in ARS-Grin or available in one form or another from nurseries in the U.S. By the time I get data worldwide on pears I expect about 20,000 named varieties, maybe more. Giant Seckel is shown in ARS-Grin as PI 49490. Just referencing since it is mentioned above.
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Stop trying to identify your cultivars by similarities to other examples. Horticulturists of past centuries were 100% wrong in their application of Linnaean morphology to plant cultivars.
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Start using dissimilarities to identify what your plants are (likely) not. For example, a greenish yellow fig with light red pulp is not Violette de Bordeaux. If it was tagged that way, send it back to the seller.
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Start ignoring posts by others (especially sellers) who claim their plant has traits x, y, and z so it must be the cultivar “ABC” or whatever.
I see. If you require certainty, I agree that’s what you need to do.
It’s about honesty, not certainty.
Imagine a man in his early twenties planting several types of pears. Years later those pears all produced and only Clapp’s favorite was labeled correct. @Richard is right to be skeptical and cautious. I think the reason things are as good as they are now is because of websites like this. Ayers was sold as Red bartlett. It took me years to figure that one out. To make matters worse i have seen them sell things that wont even live here long term. It is not a wonder people think they dont have a green thumb.