My pears don’t get much fireblight Matt. Apples 20’ away would get nailed but not the pears. My Dana Hovey got badly blighted this year but it was through a stump I had done a graft on - the grafted shoot on the stump was very vigorous and was highly blight-susceptible and infected the whole tree.
You and I are on the same page. I have several varieties of pears and all are reported to be mostly fireblight resistant. If some of these end up to not be resistant I don’t intend to keep them. There are just so many good options to mess with disease prone pear trees. Bill
1 Like
There are some such as abate fetel I gotta try at least once. I know its a bad decision and yet I look at that pear and I need to eat one at least in my lifetime.
I can see Clark’s point, and I don’t think that there are equivalent replacements for all the heirloom pears. Magness is not Comice- the skin is much thicker as I recall and they’ve yet to breed a FB resistant Bosc.
But for the most part I’m in Fluffy’s camp- Harrow Sweet is my staple pear the way Goldrush is my staple apple. Taste great and less demanding, even beyond the FB issue. Bearing young and being psyla and scab resistant are just as important here.
I do still grow Bartlett in my nursery and somehow it has never been affected by FB but if I was in KS I’d only risk a branch (graft) and not a whole tree with varieties susceptible to blight. .
2 Likes
So what are the top 5 pears to avoid? I always hear that Bosc is a FB magnet but is there a pear similar in texture and flavor to Bosc? Forrelle gets blasted for it being prone to FB.
Alan,
You and The Fluffy Bunny are right about fire blight resistance and I do follow that school of thought 99.999% of the time. You have seen my posts such as this one Pear tree Fireblight research so you dont have to . So the practical side of me grows all FB resistant pears but I do have a tree here or there I graft three feet up on a mature wild callery that’s something like clapps favorite. I know FB will get it but I can change varities and two years later I will be producing on the same tree. That’s not an approach I would recommend but when done properly your only out a little time and the roots are FB resistant. I’ve learned the hard way branches are better than trees. If the main trunk is wild callery you never get the pear killed to the ground. At least I have not had one grafted that way killed yet. Formerly I grafted low with the idea I did not want that wild callery producing the trunk I wanted the scion trunk. We live and learn.
3 Likes
I avoid the fireblight magnets, but beyond that it seems to be very location-specific. Nearly all my fireblight problems are on my asian pears, I don’t think I have ever lost a European pear to fireblight. I took out my Dana Hovey this summer but its because I grafted an asian to a trunk on it and that graft got infected and infected the whole trunk. I have the same approach on apples. For them I have had to remove many more. One thing I would agree is if you don’t feel like experimenting with how bad your blight will be and possibly top working down the road, go with the blight-resistant varieties.
1 Like
Am I being fair to pick my top five Euros pears: Harvest Queen, Comice, Harrow’s Sweet, Seckel, and Bosc because there are lots of good one out there?
Tony
2 Likes
I found my personal favorite euro pear at the grocery store today. Forrelle. This is not the correct time of year to harvest forelle as its an early season pear. The blush was very vibrant red amd they tasted great. Some need more ripening but the one I ate was really good. How do they store early fruits to make them available this time of year?
Tony,
I’m with you. Although I have not eaten a lot of E.pear varieties, I’ve read so many thread about them. Taste-wise, those would be my top five, too. Disease resistance, don’t know that.
I only know that Harrow Sweet is well worth growing for both taste and disease resistance where I live.
On your list, I’ve eaten my home grown Harrow Sweet, store bought Comice and Bose and like both a lot. Even my picky daughter announces that she loves Euro pears after eating HS and Comice. She does not care for Asian pears which I have plenty. Oh well.
1 Like
Was it grown in the Northern or Southern hemisphere?
Hello,
The varieties of euro pears that you commented are fine, but there are other varieties of better quality, I could develop a very extensive list of pears especially French and Belgian very good quality, I would like to help you with your request scion wood, but not I know how, I hope your news if you are still interested.
A greeting
No one has mentioned Luscious pear. Not only do they taste great, they don’t get mushy in the center like some varieties. They ripen after my Clapp’s favorite harvest is finished, so extend the season for me. Many of the varieties mentioned on this thread are not hardy this far north.
1 Like
Luscious are probably better up north- here in SE NY they are a bland Bartlett- barely enough sugar to be worth eating. They also ripen in Aug when I’m not really interested in pears.
I know someone who has a little Forelle tree in the essentially abandoned orchard that she acquired a couple years ago. When we found it (perceiving only that it looked like some kind of a pear tree) it had two healthy-looking fruits on it (and a couple past their prime) and we each grabbed one and bit into them at the same time…we both nearly swooned from the luscious flavor. I suspect it’s like so many fruits that we read about on this forum: so many different perceptions and growing conditions, etc. My lady friend with this orchard knows nothing about orcharding (I know twice as much) and her daughter and son-in-law who live there with her will be overseeing the health and well-being of all the orchard, gardens, and wild fruiting trees in the vicinity. I didn’t see any diseases on any trees. This little semi-farm is in a tiny, secluded, mountain valley in the coast range in Oregon. They even have a healthy American Chestnut among the many trees (up in the forest…native?). It’s kind of a Shangri-La.
I hope to get a scion next Winter and maybe attach it to a rootstock and plant it as far as possible from my three current pear trees.
3 Likes
I’d be surprised if your friend’s chestnut tree is a native American chestnut, it’s far more likely a Chinese chestnut that was planted, accidentally or on purpose. Americans are only native to the east coast and I don’t know that they ever grew in the northwest (thought I could be mistaken I suppose). It’s interesting because I have/had what was the second largest confirmed living American chestnut in the state of Pennsylvania (and it may have been the largest because the largest at the time mine was #2 was said to be sick with the blight). Sadly, my tree is succumbing and is almost dead, I’ll harvest it this summer and make furniture from the wood.
1 Like
Native chestnuts continue to thrive in the west- My sister even buys them from a farmer’s market in Arcata CA. Take a tree out of a highly humid environment and many disease pressures decline. Enjoy your fruity shangri-la.
I’d like to hear more because I’ve been of the belief that only a very few native trees are hanging in there for the long term. Many will grow to 10, 20 or 30 years before dying back. There are hybrids available now that are fairly true after many generations of cross-breeding and of course there are Chinese, Carpathian and other varieties, but true American chestnuts. As I said before, I could be mistaken, but I might have to confer with the American Chestnut Foundation on this one. 
1 Like
Well, you learn something new everyday. I found this on Wikipedia (and I recognize that not everything there can be trusted…
“Soon after that, though, the American chestnuts were nearly wiped out by chestnut blight. The discovery of the blight fungus on some Asian chestnut trees planted on Long Island, New York, was made public in 1904. Within 40 years, the nearly four billion-strong American chestnut population in North America was devastated;[45] only a few clumps of trees remained in Michigan, Wisconsin, California and the Pacific Northwest.[32] Due to disease, American chestnut wood almost disappeared from the market for decades, although quantities can still be obtained as reclaimed lumber.[46] Today, they only survive as single trees separated from any others (very rare), and as living stumps, or “stools”, with only a few growing enough shoots to produce seeds shortly before dying. This is just enough to preserve the genetic material used to engineer an American chestnut tree with the minimal necessary genetic input from any of the disease-immune Asiatic species. Efforts started in the 1930s are still ongoing to repopulate the country with these trees, in Massachusetts[47] and many places elsewhere in the United States.[48] In the 1970s, geneticist Charles Burnham began back-breeding Asian chestnut into American chestnut populations to confer blight resistance with the minimum difference in genes.[49]”
So it seems that there very well may be some still living in the west and northwest, but like in the east, they’re very isolated and very rare (as mine had been. The only reason mine lived so long is because there weren’t sources for the blight nearby). Thanks for the info…