Top working Callery Pears weather permitting

You’re having fun. I can taste those sweet juicy pears already.

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Yes i love grafting Matt. I will post some follow up pictures later. This fluctuating weather might keep me from posting those follow up pictures.

I had no idea you were a major grower like that! Are you saying you are going to have around 600 production pear trees? Or are you just planting a lot of seedlings for fun, or perhaps even you mean 600 wild pears? I’m confused (and a little dumbfounded!). If you are planting 600 fruiting pear trees that you are going to grow to maturity, what on earth are you going to do with so many pears? Just curious.

Awesome photos, btw.

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Yes im growing that many out. When i retire someday i plan to be sitting on a nice orchard by then. I do sell pears to the local grocery store but so far i cant produce enough to keep up with demand. I grow about 5 acres of fruit currently. Would not consider myself a major grower. Thank you i figured taking some pictures might help someone at some point. We like pears pretty well and i know a lot of other people do too.

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Very, very cool. For some strange reason, when I think of large orchard’s I think of apple, peach, even cherry. But of course someone has to grow those pears I see in the stores, so why not you! And it would be a great thing to do in retirement- though I’m not sure retirement would be the right word if you have that many trees…I’d just call it changing jobs at retirement age! Either way, its really neat know you are that serious about your love of fruit growing!

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There are several apple orchards nearby but I don’t know of any that are just devoted to pear production. I always thought that there was an opportunity for someone to take advantage of at least the local void in my area. There is one orchard that I know of locally that does grow a limited amount of Olympic/Korean Giant pears and they are priced 2-3 times higher than the other types. Sure hope you have plans for adding this one to your list. Bill

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Bill.
Great idea and i definately did add a couple of trees this year of KG. Thanks

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Thecityman,
I really enjoy pears so even if I did not sell them I’d still grow them. By the time I get close to retirement I would like to get everything in full production.

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I can’t wait to taste worden so i’m hopeful the grafts will take. I did some top working with it. Gamble grafting is grafting in Kansas this year.

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Clark,

OMG! 600? I have problems of trying to maintain my backyard’s 13, 14 trees!
I assumed that you keep track of what’s the ratio of A. pears vs. E. pears?

Tom

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Tom,

I just have a dozen Asian pears at the moment but that is part of what I’m adding is more rootstock for those. I’m grafting several new varieties of Asian pears this year. My goal is to be growing 50+ types of pears by the end of the year.

Clark

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So far these difficult to graft pears are doing ok with the scions that were added. I sure would not expect more than half the scions will take considering the difficulty of these wild trees combined with the unusual weather. I felt the grafts and the colder they feel means they are alive and so far so good. If they take they will produce pears in 2 years since these are very large trees. If you look close some are in the green tip stage now but that does not mean much in terms of compatibility.

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This is not success it’s merely an update on these difficult to graft pears. There is still plenty of time for graft failures and takes.

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Clark,

I usually knocked off all the growths below the union to get all my grafts growing faster.

Tony

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Yes that’s definitely on my list Tony. Thanks

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Any particular reason that you chose to cleft graft instead of bark graft? I’m assuming it’s because you had some nice thick scions, and your trunk was of adequate diameter.

Clefts heal a little faster than bark grafts and they don’t break off as easy if there is a large amount of growth.

Got it. I’ve never gotten a 100% clear answer as to which I should use other than it depends on the size of the scion and the size of the stock.

I used almost bark grafts almost exclusively last year when I switched over my trees into DR varieties. I had some skinny scions and then most of the trees were about the size of my thumb. Additionally it was my first time grafting, so I was a bit nervous and wanted to fit as many scions on each as I could. Actually I half expected all of them to fail.

This year I’ll be working some onto larger stock, i.e. branches, that don’t have all of their limbs removed, so I’ll probably use cleft for those.

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Sounds good Rally cleft versus rind is just a preference based on situation for me. I use both types of grafts and typically the larger trunks that are to big around I use rind aka bark graft and for smaller branches I can still split with a butcher knife I use cleft.

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That’s basically the feeling I got from many people. From what I’ve gathered is a lot of people may have tried both and prefer one over the other for whatever reason. I know of one person who tried clefts twice, and got none to take, but had 100% on bark… he promptly decided to use bark grafts from then on.

I’m sure it also just depends on the tree as well. Last year I had one tree that I decided to try a cleft on because my nurse branches were only an inch or two lower and if I tried to peel the bark I would have hit them. These were trees in the ground for only one year, so I wasn’t able to really prune the year before to avoid that problem.

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