Moved here a year ago I have two 60’ pear trees, last year all the fruit fell before ripening and they’re really too high for me to do anything with anyways. Should I go ahead and cut them down to stop all the fruit flies? One pear tree is 200 ft North of my raspberries, blackberries and orchard trees the other one’s 200 ft South. They start falling to the ground middle of August and probably for the next month. Flies are tearing up my promocaine raspberries and can’t tell about anything else cuz my orchards only one years old and none of my fruit trees fruited this year.
They have a nice Bloom don’t really want to get rid of them but I don’t want a million fruit flies either. I don’t want to be causing more work on myself and lose a lot of fruit next year by not knowing. Being so far in the country I don’t know if it would make a big difference or not?
You need to pick pears before they turn yellow, then ripen them on the counter. Many kinds also require a period of chill on the fridge before counter ripening. You might shorten the trees to make them more manageable, but I certainly wouldn’t cut them down! I doubt that would change the flies. Spray with organic Spinosad (Monterrey Fruit Spray) several times, starting when the petals fall on the pear trees. Better yet, mix Surround kaolin spray with Spinosad. Get a picker basket on a long pole or a “Twister” to help reach the higher pears. Also, you can keep the unripe pears in the fridge for several weeks. Or freeze ripe pears and make pear crisp all winter long. But don’t cut the trees.
As for shortening the trees I think you’d like them much better if you took off the top half or so this winter. You don’t say how experience you are with pruning large, old trees, or how you feel about climbing, but you might want to seek out opinions here before you take that option.
That beauty was planted with love for a reason, and looking at the fruit I’m guessing you might have something really nice there once you learned how to ripen them. Once you get it down to size and thinned down so that light and air get into the canopy better you might find you like it a lot better. Might even start grafting other varieties on here and there.
I would not want a 60’ pear tree either… but I had a back yard several years ago that had a 30 ft pear tree and it got loaded with fruit.
When they started falling … we picked a couple 5 gal buckets of the nice fruit remaining on the tree, on the lower branches, and they were still quite hard and green (different variety than yours).
We put those 5 gal buckets in the basement and covered the top with trash bag and checked them weekly… and in just a couple weeks they yellowed up and were excellent eating and made some awesome preserves.
I hope you can cut it down to size some and keep it.
If you have a neighbor with hogs or chickens… they might come and collect the fallen fruit for you for feed. You might have other neighbors that would pick some of the extra that you don’t need.
I know the tree we had produced way more than we needed.
Great advice already given. You just need to rastle those beasts and get them under control. Are they both the same variety of pear? If so, you could certainly work one or both over to however many new varieties you want. I have a pear tree that was at my yard when we bought the place that is younger and nowhere near the size of yours; but the rootstock had a branch that outgrew the grafted variety. I started with a major pruning and have been systematically working that half of the tree over to multiple new varieties. It’s been quite fun and this year I am getting fruit for the first time from two of six new varieties on the tree.
Have fun with them!
I think they are both Asian pears which I’m not a big fan of. I planted some new pears which I plan on keeping them pruned and maintained for eating. If I did keep them I would have to cut them low which there are no limbs really below 10’. If I could cut them down to 5’ and they grew out new growth that might work. I really don’t want to graft or spend time on them since I planted new pears and I’ve got 1 acre of plant to keep up with and 10 acre of grass to cut. Never thought about people with live stock that might want them.
I just don’t think having thousands of rotting pear is going to be good next year with the flies reproducing especially if I really don’t like the pear anyway. I just hate to cut down a nice tree.
I never picked any to see if they would ripen since they never got bigger than a golf ball size. Just to many fruit for the tree to produce, the trees loaded with fruit. I’ll pick some today and see if they ripen.
Hmm, sounds like they need to go. I understand not wanting to cut down a big tree, but if it just spawns fruit flies what’s the purpose. Counting on other people to pick up fruit is risky, although it would be great if it could happen. You could cut them off and leave just the lowest branch. That way they wouldn’t die, and for sure will sprout new shoots all over the place which you could train the way you want and then later on remove the top branch you left. And, if that doesn’t work…well you just cut it down anyway and your out nothing. Who knows though, you may change your mind about grafting in the future.
The one in the back will come down since it’s taking up the sun from some the nearby muscadines which needs more sun. I’ll look into how to prune the one in the front as low as I can to see if new branches will grow to a more manageable tree (this is the one in my pictures).
I can see why you’d want it gone, and sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. Now that I’m approaching late middle age I’ve started realizing that you can’t let things take up more of your life than they’re worth to you.
By the way, is that really just one tree in that picture? It almost looks like it could be a group of seedling trees! Also by the way, pear wood is pretty neat stuff -fine grained, pearlescent to look at if nicely finished, quite hard. May be that wood craftspeople would like a few chunks if you decide to remove it/them.
I’m not sure if it’s one tree or not at the ground I really didn’t look at it very well I just went out to pick a couple fruit and take those two pictures I’ll take a better look at it tomorrow.
Yeah I’ve looked into pear wood and I might have to take a couple seedling pecans out as well, I would definitely use the wood as much as I could one way or another.
I have no clue, it would be nice to know what it is I’ve just never seen one fully ripe they always seem to fall to the ground. I think I might have found one last year that did not hit the ground and it still was no bigger than a golf ball but the flies have already gotten to it before I could taste it.
Any time there are multiple leaders coming out of the ground there is a good chance you have a seedling tree. Sometime a tree can collapse and send up competing shoots that all start above the graft line to sustain the variety, but that is exceptional. If they are both seedlings, the odds of the fruit being good no matter when you harvest are slim.
I will be somewhat surprised if taking down the pears will decrease fly pressure. It takes them very little time to increase their population to match whatever is the food source, but if they create more mess than value to you, you might as well remove them. They are not even indigenous trees judging from the Asian appearance of the fruit- what man giveth…
Of course, you could attempt to bring down their height a great deal and graft on pears you love. Pears are the easiest fruit to graft I grow and you will get fruit much quicker from grafts than planting a whip if you can get good light on them.
Perhaps you can enlighten me on what pears are ‘indigenous’…
If I desired to save the tree for grafting…I’d remove all the old and leave the finger-sized 3 to 6 feet sprouts, and select one of them to graft to in the spring or in a couple years.
Agree with Blueberry, assuming you want some type of pear, there is enough root system there to support many varieties. Chances are one of our Florida members would assist you in grafting - you might want to check out the member map and contact another member who has the experience and may be willing to help. I help my neighbors a lot and I think most grafters would gladly assist you
