Ok! Thank you! Maybe I can try some more this Saturday! So it’s not too late, even though the callery pear trees are all leaves at this point?
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That wont hurt anything. Callery have plenty of energy stored to push growth in the grafts. It is hot weather and lack of moisture that causes problems with grafting.
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I grafted onto callery pear last June and July and many took.
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They are absolutely rampant in the small town where I live in WV. Thousands in every space left unkept. Fields of them
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I would graft them over to good pears and kill out the ones i didn’t graft so they couldn’t reproduce.
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Mr. Clark,
Do you have any experience with transplanting callery at this time of year, assuming that it is relatively small in size? I know it would be better to wait until dormant but some of these seedlings wont be available to me by that time
Thank you sir
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Have transplanted many to where i wanted them this time of year and never lost one of them doing it. They were not alway considered an undesirable tree. In the old days every nursery i know of used them for rootstocks.
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This is my new digging tool, used for loosening the deep soil around a Callery taproot.
Tested first when digging out 8 large hydrangeas, it excelled and was then put to use digging out invasive leatherleaf mahonia, and then for releasing 4 volunteer Callery pear for topworking. Two of those pears now have Clark’s Yellow Pear, and a third has Harrow Sweet (thank you @disc4tw ! and @clarkinks !). It is mostly fabricated from free tubing that I found on the side of the road. It is weighty enough that it can be thrown through the first several inches of the soil, and then be stepped into the deeper layers.
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I dug up a couple from the edge of my woods… back in January… and transplanted them out in my field.
Grafted them late Feb when they started leafing out some.
Looks like there might be pears in my future.
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They look great you will have plenty of pears! Callery roots are the secret to many locations. They adapt quickly. The problem is in the future we need to use BET because callery have landed on most states bad list for the same reason they are great rootstocks!
Sorry, Clark,- what is BET?
I’ve been dealing w some big health problems so anything w growing any sort of plants has taken a way back seat.
For some reason the tree which gave us some 30-40lbs for our first harvest last year has maybe 10 pears on it! Lol. It’s taking a year off, maybe.
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BET = Pyrus Betulifolia - another of the wild species in the pear family. It tends to be a very cold hardy and weather tolerant pear rootstock. It naturally tends to limit tree height to about 30 feet max though this is not a fixed limit. It is not as invasive as Pyrus Calleriana. Clark likes to spell it Beautifolia because he never met a pear he didn’t love! 
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Sorry to hear about the health issue. I’m glad your callery yielded some good fruit last year! Ayers is notorius for being biennial. BET are the legal version of a hardy pear. Callery is a great pear rootstock. Many states are considering callery an invasive species now. Nurseries cannot sell the callery rootstock anymore. Betulifolia is not a word a spell checker so it corrects it. Someone always notices if it is spelled wrong once of the 10000x. I’m not concerned about spelling on a blog or text message or i would mark up @Fusion_power structure above. " Clark likes to spell it, Beautifolia, because he never met a pear he didn’t love!" Corrected commas and removed incorrect symbols at the end, eg." ". My mother always said people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks. Get better soon @ClothAnnie we will all be praying for your speedy recovery!
Ps: @Fusion_power it is pyrus calleryana not “Pyrus Calleriana.”
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Would you believe that was deliberate? It was. Yes, I have a wacky sense of humor sometimes. I looked both betulifolia and calleryana up on wiki before posting.
Good one, but the prognosis isn’t good
if you relocate it at this time.
Best if done dormant.
I just took a photo to share the vivacious nature of callery. The roots are actually anchored in between cement and it will probably be impossible to extract without destroying either the roots or gutter. Its roots probably penetrated through the gap in cement into the soil below it.
I have many other seedling callery to play with. They are a ubiquitous sight where I live.
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I agree on all that.
I had spotted a fresh ‘patch’ of them by the highway but during the winter a mowing crew had cut most of them to the ground…so I only dug a couple and grafted to them just after they leafed out this spring. By next year…the roots’ll be too extensive and I’ll look for some freebies some other spot of disturbed soil.
I dug up a lot and grafted them, I’ve still got some grafting and regrafting to do but I’ve got dozens of Asian pear trees growing!
I just gave one away to someone who never even hard of Asian parts and now it will be growing next to the Shenandoah he just planted.
They’re mostly Korean Giant aka Olympic which is the best(available in the US) as far as I know, but I have not eaten any other Asian pears off the tree.
PS the middle pot has apples on crabapple suckers.
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