As i transition from pear season into autumn berries, i wanted to document the end of the season. @Fusion_power needs good documentation on this. I grow some pears in reduced light also to ripen later intentionally. I wll be picking pears that look like this today. They will be kieffer and duchess D’ Angoulme. The majority of the crop has fallen but the idea is to leave some pears until the last minute of the season when temperatures begin to drop down to freezing. I picked these a few minutes ago. Later this month i will pick autumn berries until and even after deep freeze arrives. I always leave a few pears that i pick frozen every year
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Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m assuming most of those are past their normal picking times. How well do they ripen after leaving them on the tree so long.
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They are still firmly hanging on the tree. They are still not fully ripe. Duchess d’ Angoulme , kieffer, and douglas are great late season pears.
They are so delicious!
This is another really late season pear called El Dorado.
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It will be frozen pears only from now on. Today is November 8th. @Fusion_power this will be the types of pears you need. These are Duchess D’ Angoulme, kieffer, and Douglas. If they are any later they wont work for me. One of my friends is helping me pick pears today. He is 6’ 4" which is handy in my orchard. We both picked bucketfuls. Everyone wins when we work together around here. Next season coming up is autumn berries and there are lots of them.
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I just picked the last of my Kieffer pears early this week. They are really nice looking this year and taste really good. One of them weighted close to 1.5 lbs.
You have some nice looking pears this year. Great job.
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Thank you, the kieffer really are a great late season pear! The cold nights really make them delicious. Kieffer are really not as gritty as people claim. It is simply not true. They are more gritty by the core which we know about and avoid. I think of them as crisp not gritty at least in Kansas.
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So true about the grittiness. I know I had a Kieffer pear at my other house years ago. It was the standard size, huge, probably 30+ feet tall. The pears were a lot grittier than the Kieffer pears I am growing now, for some reason. The grit on the older ones were quite large. Like tapioca pudding size. I have to sift then out when we were making pear butter with them. The grit in the ones I have now is, like you said, near the core area and a LOT smaller than the other Kieffer pears I had, thank goodness.
I have given a lot of the Kieffers away this year and people tell me they love them. At times they ask me for more pears than they do apples.
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@Fusion_power @mayhaw9999 and I are doing some collaboration and information sharing. We are trying to get the world up to speed on pears. It is a very big challenge. We may have to collaborate on an ebook eventually to cover a fraction of the information. @scottfsmith is also an encyclopedia of pears. @Fusion_power id trying to put some of the data together that we have already put out there. Thisisnot an easy job. The reason history is so important isbecause its our future also. The pear breeder VanMon work has never been duplicated by any university or program. It has been hundreds of years ago now since he did his pear breeding. The romans are where the white doyenne pear came from that as we say is a key pear in the future. Barseck is another pear that is a key breeding pear. @tonyOmahaz5 is getting his new trees up to size at his new home and will quickly help us with asian pears and unique perspectives on rare Chinese pears. Growingfruit.org is the only website to find this rare information
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Clark, I know I appreciate all the information you have been providing us with pears you have been growing as well.It helped me pick out the few pears trees I am growing now. Without your information I would have probably picked out the wrong ones and then been sorry I did not research it enough. Then with reading the other members you mentioned giving their great information here it helped me realize there is a LOT more pear choices out there than I ever knew about. I had only enough room for three pear trees but having read all the great information here about pears I may have been tempted to put in more pear tress than what I did.
I know once people I share my apples with knew I had pears they kept wanting to know " did you bring any more pears with you?" when I would drop off the apples to them. Pears are more popular than what I realized.
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Thank you, I appreciate your kind words here.
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Lots of pears, Clark! We rarely get to the 20s before late December and then for just a few nights. For the winter maybe a half dozen nights will drop into the high 20s and very occasionally low 20s. I’m able to leave the very late apples on the tree until after Jan 1. Lady Williams is my favorite apple to pick in the New Year.
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I went by the pear tree in this photo yesterday. https://www.selectedplants.com/miscan/peartree.jpg
It is now a few feet taller and drop dead gorgeous again. I have two grafts growing here at the house.
I very much want that foliage with these blossoms. https://www.selectedplants.com/miscan/cabot.jpg
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