I just can’t find any nursery selling the scion. I’d say the home growers interest is minimal as I’d say more people in this forum live in higher chill areas.
I can’t really afford space wise to buy a whole tree for every variety I’m interested in trying out.
If I can decide and find the 3 varieties I can graft one on my rootstock and park the wood of the other two onto my new Hood coming in 2024 or try grafting to an Asian pear. As long as it lives until next spring I can harvest and graft over.
Or if this next year gets good growth on the first graft I can try chip grafting of the second variety in the same year.
With a few exceptions, most of the information you get from nurseries about fruit in the South is a bunch of crap. If you think information is bad with pears, try plums. It’s better to talk to people who have experience growing in similar climates.
Got me a Goldenboy from JFE on the glowing recommendations in this thread. Thanks for all of the info everyone. You all seem to say it’s mostly self fertile, but should I put a graft onto it to help much?
Good luck with it. My long term experience is a little more mixed than my early experience. It’s not as fireblight resistant as I initially thought. It will want to get big. I recommend keeping it pruned back small enough so that you can easily control fireblight with a pare of clippers. When it hit my tree, the tree was so big that it had gotten completely out of control before I made the decision to cut it back by about 2/3rds so that I could reach all parts of the tree with loppers. It required a chain saw. Thanks.
Well, we may have some reliable data to add for Ayers. It has bloomed fine here in West Central Georgia, recently reclassified to 8A. 650-850 chill hours most years.
Unless I have a mislabeled couple trees, Ayers is so early and has a very thin fruit set
but really big pretty fruits of the blooms that do set fruits.