Great choices in pears. Those are going to taste excellent! You have some rare varieties.
Iâm adding this year:
Daisi Li
Shinko
Burford
Tyson
Harvest Queen
Harrow 601
Harrow 609
Korean Giant
Leona
Harrow Sweet
Charles Harris
Harrow 609
Harrow Delicious
Golden Boy
Harrow 604
Last year:
Pineapple
Treasure
Maxine
Potomac
Seuri Li
In their 4th leaf:
Tennousi
Southern Bartlett
Southern King
Tenn
Meadows
Warren
Acres Homes
Hood
Velma
Now I just need some good luck. A hard freeze 2 weeks ago killed all blossoms and fruitlets, bloom was 3-4 weeks earlier than last year.
Last year, the deer found my new orchard. They ate all the fruit and most of the leaves before I could get a fence up.
For those concerned with Hood polination, I found Acres Homes overlapped the last half of Hood blooming period.
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Oh my, thatâs a lot of pears! You must lots of land for all those trees. We have some acreage too, but I have to resist filling it up with fruit trees.
Sorry to hear about the deer damage, we had some of our newly planted apple trees damaged by them last year. Now all my fruit trees have fences around them
Weâre just adding a Maxine and Harrow Sweet this year.
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Today, I grafted Docteur Desportes onto Harrow Delight.
I also grafted Elliot and Belle Lucrative onto Seckel.
If these take, Iâll consider my initial pear collection efforts largely complete.
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We will be bench grafting
Des Urbanistes
Gorham
Harrow Sweet
Harvest Queen
Magness
Potomac
Tyson
Warren
Many of these selections were based on recommendations from people here, so thanks, guys! All on OHxF 333. First time doing this, so weâll see how it goes. Some of the things that Iâm thinking of for the future include Seckel, Clara Frijs, and Duchess Bronzee, but I feel like I still really need to educate myself about the older pear varieties.
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Jeremymillrood
Better prune that baby down, no?
I will, just waiting for it to get well established.
So far I have decided on Korean Giant, and Hosui for this year. Two great pears that should be great in our climate which is always over 1,100 chill hours a year. They both flower basically at the same time and yet produce at different times, the only thing I worry about is that Hosui can sometimes be very blight sensitive.
I will decide later what else to plant.
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Hereâs Docteur Desportes on Harrow Delight/ OHxF.87.
Hereâs Elliot and Belle Lucrative on Seckel/ OHxF.87.
All were grafted on Monday.
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@Matt_in_Maryland
Iâm sure your aware Docteur Desportes is a Bosc flavored type pear. It grows very nice for me but keep in mind it is virus infected. I donât know the long term results of growing it, The USDA supplies scions for the variety and the people that are members of this forum that grow it speak about it in high regard. My pear has not fruited yet. Typically I do not grow virus infected fruits because of the problems that go with them. Iâve not observed problems with this variety at this time https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?accid=%20PI+541173. The virus is P. communis âNouveau Poiteauâ that it tested POSITIVE for. Some viruses are devastating and I donât mean to play it down but this virus appears to not fit into that category. Chicken pox like we get as children is a virus we accept and live with but devastating life threatening viruses are out there. This virus apparently in my understanding from people who grow this pear consider it in the chicken pox category.
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It looks like Docteur Desportes is virus free now, see here NCGR-Corvallis: Pyrus Catalog, the xls from them says tested it does not even say it has the virus anymore.
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If you open the description it shows positive at the bottom https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?id=1436109
I will ask because it shows P. communis 'Nouveau Poiteau" 3 times and only once does it say positive. The other two times they did not find it
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Joseph Postman told me that their Docteur Desportes is disease free. âP. communis 'Nouveau Poiteauâ is not a disease, itâs what they grafted the Docteur Desportes on to, âP. communis 'Nouveau Poiteauâ is a variety of pear.
Thanks for the questions. This helps me understand how users interpret our data, and I can see how our Pathogen Test data can lead to confusion. In some cases we maintain multiple âinventoriesâ or unique trees of an âaccessionâ. In this case, for the accession âDocteur Desportesâ, the original virus infected plant (inventory number 177.001) went through heat therapy and meristem culture in an attempt to eliminate the viruses. Plants resulting from different meristems are given different âinventoryâ numbers, but they are all sub-clones of the same âaccessionâ. When the Nouveau Poiteau graft assay was performed on the original plant (CPYR 177.001) it tested positive. The results for sub-clone CPYR 177.005 were ambiguous and the results for sub-clone CPYR 177.004 were negative. The virus tested sub-clone CPYR 177.004 was added to the collection and the infected or ambiguous trees were destroyed, so some of this information is for my historical reference and is probably too much information for you the user - Joseph Postman
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That is very useful information because I thought it was still infected. That was exactly the way I read the data and I suspect a lot of other people did not grow doctoer Deportes for the same reason. Many scions showed virus infected last year on the main page so it sounds like those were not actually infected either. Better safe than sorry I guess. Now we know and that puts a lot more pears on my radar.thanks for doing the additional research Alan.
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I have asked a new question because I am confused by something in their excel spreadsheet, I think that false positives are at least somewhat common yet just the same like you have said better safe than sorry.
You are welcome. I read that âDocteur Desportesâ, is easily targeted by Blister Mites, itâs moderately susceptible to fire blight, and can get slight damage from Pseudomonas disease which seems common in pears. Those are the only problems with it, and a lot of people would not care about that. Certainly better than having a nasty disease.
I wonder how âPyronia veitchiiâ is as a root stock since they used it with some âDocteur Desportesâ scion.