My warren died and after reading the recent warren thread, I’m not replacing with another. Looking for a bulletproof pear. (Like what the Contender is for peaches.) Hoping for high frost/freeze tolerance and good disease resistance. Other pears I have are seckel, harrow delight, potomac, ayers, moonglow, summercrisp and keifer. Any orientals? What do you recommend?
Lol, you will get an earfull.
Here are the pears I would grow given your location. Ayers, Blake’s Pride, Clark’s Yellow, Drippin’ Honey, Harrow Sweet, Kieffer, Maxine, Potomac, Seckel (or Seckel XL), Shenandoah, and Tyson. Go through those and compare with what you already have.
A few others are worth a look. Ambrosia and Ewart are examples
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My first question is what type of pear do you want?
Fine textured Euro pears tend to be slow to produce but worth the wait. Ayer’s Would be my top suggestion. To be honest, Euro Pears take so long to produce I haven’t had time to really evaluate many of them that are just starting to hit production. Seckel type Euro pears are excellent and a bit faster to produce then most but not the most disease resistant.
Asian pears are fast to produce and more manageable. The only one I would call bulletproof is Korean Giant which is a lower sugar aromatic type.
The hybrids are fast to produce but have a somewhat course texture. Kieffer is so bulletproof and productive you might find contempt for it. A Kieffer on standard rootstock might live 150+ years. Douglas, Duchess and Turnbull are great varieties and relatively problem free.
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Moonglow is hard to ripen properly and susceptible to frost, but very fb resistant. Harrow pears are highly susceptible to fire blight. Im removing all my harrow pears ( delight, sweet, and crisp). Kieffer is borderline inedible. Ayers is somewhat frost susceptible but pretty resilient against fireblight and delicious. My best pear vs fireblight: A tree I bought at food lion labeled anjou, but clearly not anjou. Likely a root stock, maybe old home x bartlett. Almost killed one year by fireblight, but since then, very resistant. Frost thins this one very well for me every spring except this one.
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Thanks! I’m willing to wait, but just tired of getting total losses from frosts. Both my ayers and moonglow were fully flowered and may not have a single pear on either. The keifer had a small bloom. It’s fighting me on height. All it wants is straight up, every branch. It was listed as semi-dwarf, but may have some mislabeling as its 12+ after pruning. Extremely difficult to get spread. It also lost almost everything to frosts.
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Sad to hear that about harrows. Cummins says delight is fb resistant. Just stuck one in the ground this spring. Guess I’ll see. I hear you about keifers, but at our previous house we got some if them and given cool storage time got much better. Just doesn’t seem like there’s a universal, top choice for ruggedness-resistance-taste, like contender is for peaches.
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I have an unknown variety of pear that produces bushels of fruit every year here in Iowa zone 5b. Never sprayed. It also has a nice spread to it. I could send you scion wood next spring if interested.
Here’s a little info about it and some pictures.
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For a change of pace in taste/texture, I’d plant Korean Giant, good blight resistance, bears at early age, crispy/crunchy, refreshing.
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