The pears you may not have heard of and should consider growing

Frankly, the taste is weak. A huge pear with a weak taste. Perhaps the soil conditions do not fit. Or there is not enough heat. Some varieties are very dependent on the soil. For example. I have a very good variety Devo. Pears are large and beautiful and the taste I can not understand. I like the variety. Harvest, without periodicity, compatible with a quince.

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You can make an insert from a compatible grade, but I’m not interested. This complicates the vaccination and is more expensive than the seedling. Now there are enough varieties compatible with a quince and there is a choice.

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The English spelling of the name is Devoe. According to Joseph Postman (curator of the ARS pear collection), as grown in Oregon, it has creamy flavor with a hint of vanilla.

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@yri32,
Here are a couple of photos of interstem pear grafts I did last year. We have some callery that can be difficult to graft directly but I grow a small yellow pear that I use as an excellent interstem.
35E5ADCC-EE8D-43D6-936E-C5786D03827671D46CEA-45B6-4B48-B8AB-D96A0252660C!

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Growing several tyson trees now, abate fetel, forelle, doyenne comice, doyenne gris, carrick, eldorado,etc. My favorite hard to grow variety is my clapps favorite.

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I tried Abate Fetel last year too, if it survives the winter.

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Why is the Clapp’s Favorite hard to grow? Is it because of your your region or just in general?
I have also heard that the Doyenne Comice was a very hard pear to grow and to have the nice taste the ones grown in Washington state have. I have been leery of trying one of the Comice trees out here in Ohio. I hate to waste 4-5 years and find out it was a dud here.

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They both grow very well but both are highly susceptible to fireblight. At this link http://phytopath.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/cpds-archive/vol57/CPDS_Vol_57_No_1_2_(9-12)1977.pdf see the bottom chart
C. Classes 1.0 to 4.9 (fire blight penetrated trunk and scaffold limbs; productivity severely affected)
Bosc 5 4.9
Aurora 4 4.5
Buerrce Henri Courcelle 2 4.5
V25021 2 4.5
Magness 9 4.5
Merton Pride 3 4.4
Souvenir du Congress 3 4.3
Fertility 3 3.8
Flemish Beauty 3 3.8
Highland 4 3.7
Precose de Trevoux 2 3.5
Santa Maria 3 3.4
Devoe 3 3.2
President Devoilaine 2 3.0
Sheldon 3 2.8
President Barabe 2 2.5
Bartlett 6 2.2
Doyenne d’Ete 3 2.2
Dr. Jules Guyot 3 1.6
Starkcrimson (Clapp’s Favorite sport) 5 1.5
Clapp’s Favorite 2 1.5
Gorham 2 1.4
Buerr6 Hardy 2 1.3
Dessertina 2 1.3
Phileson 2 1

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I collected some scion yesterday from someone that wants a old pear tree propagated. They love the taste of fruit off this old neglected tree which was about 25’ perfect with no hint of disease. It may be worth taking note of. Here is a picture of the fruit!

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What do you think it might be? Seems small and round, is it sweet?

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I will leave it to Clark and the other pear experts to guess the variety.

Here is the description they gave: “We like to eat them straight off the tree. They are crunchy but very sweet and juicy. They will go more yellow and soften on the tree. At that stage about half of them are good but the rest start to get dark brown rotten spots. In the house they stay good a long time. They will soften eventually. We usually eat them before they reach that point” Ripens in September.

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@39thparallel
Without seeing the leaves it’s hard to say but the description tells me a lot. Remember pear taste buds vary and one persons excellent pear may not be my idea of a perfect pear. To further complicate things there are many seedlings. I will graft it on a big tree Mike so we can taste the fruit when you get a chance and we will figure out what it is. It may be wonderful or could be awful. I hope it’s all it’s said to be. If I was going by picture alone without history I could name 20+ without research that look somewhat like it eg. So- sweet Our HARDIEST European Pear - SO SWEET – Green Barn Farm
image
It’s possible it might also be an orient that was not thinned
http://dallasfruitgrower.typepad.com/dallas-fruit-vegetable/peaches/


You can see another example below where they believe the pear is shipova (it’s likely not since shipova is red blushed). I see a slight red blush on one fruit which if grown in shade would be possible.
pear with hazelnut and cinnamon crumble – The Circus Gardener's Kitchen
image

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One thing I have noticed here at some old home abandoned sites the original pear tree may die but there is often a seedling growing nearby

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@Derby42
Sometimes I think the seedling was what they planted and it was good enough for them. The pear that was on this property was at least 100 years old but maybe older and it made a kieffer look good! At one point I thought the graft died and the rootstock took over but I have since came to the opinion maybe they never grafted them at all. The common people have never lived like the aristocrats. Another thing to consider is what did they do with their waste? Not to be disgusting but human waste , pear cores etc. all went somewhere within close proximity of the house. Seedling fruit trees were very common 100 years ago.

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Good points Clark, they may have been seedling all along. There is an old house a few miles from here that they bull dozed a couple of weeks ago. It had a pear tree and a seedling pear in the back yard. I never saw fruit on it but it must have at some point to have produced the seedling. Odd thing the tree was very small , twelve feet tops. Had lots of damage of some kind, the trunk was severely damaged on one side, fire blight maybe.

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Could have just been age. Many old seedling pears never got over 12 feet tall and others were huge. Ive seen pears and old apples hanging on by what looked like a thread and 20 years later they look the same.

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I think seedling pears were the norm not the exception at old farm houses in the deep South. Poor farmers did not have money to spend on something grafted. Probably a lot of them really did not know how that worked anyway. A lot of early attempts at growing pears failed because of fire blight and our humidity and low chilling hours. It probably didn’t take long for people to figure out that a seed from a surviving LeConte pear or something similar survived better than some fancy grafted pear from a catalogue. I imagine most people were more interested in good pears for preserves anyway. It’s not like they had refrigeration for keeping them. And dried fruit is hard to store in our climate without plastic containers to keep the humidity out. Down here even watermelon reigns got made into preserves. God bless.

Marcus

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Brings back old memories. Large sections of the deep south fit into this category.

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I agree with you. If they were to grow anything it was being used for something. To feed the family or to feed the animals. It did not have to be “pretty” to be used. Everything grown had a purpose.
The heirloom apples and pears most people find as “okay” in today’s standards were looked at with pleasure years ago. Having food on the table was better than starving.
I remember helping my grandparents with peeling apples and pears for making butters and preserves. They weren’t perfect fruit so you just cut out the bad spots but in the end it tasted DELICIOUS.

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Really good info. TY.

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