I love my pear trees. I prune them some, and they give me fruit. Apples are a pest nightmare…curculio, ofm, etc etc etc. I might get one or two apples, despite their being disease resistant types.
Despite my best intentions to spray and stuff, I never do. Seems like it would be a better use of my limited space to plant some more pear trees, instead.
What does the peanut gallery think? I know what Clark’s answer will be!
Apples grown in my environment do not have the dizzying array of pests you experience. Over the years I’ve enjoyed trials of a number of varieties. The count of them has dropped over the years and I keep trying to increase the pears. Fireblight is a huge problem here for them and not for the apples. Several classes of pears also have a definite need for chill hours which is not going to happen here. So I recommend that you grow more pears and be glad that you can!
If you do nothing but fight and loose, then i would change it up. if you don’t have Asian pears, maybe there is your compromise, get the crunch of an apple. I seem to be in the opposite side of things, my pears keep getting diseases and won’t produce, where my apples produce every year (still quite young, nothing is even 5 years in the ground yet). My Asian pears are the exception here.
But i gave up on cherries due to never being able to get fruit on them. So i would say, if you keep losing, go ahead and try something else.
I like pears more than apples, and hence my answer is a definite yes. The main reason I grow apples is because they store well through the winter when there is no other home grown fruit available. Pick varieties that store well.
You do what works for you. Last year a friend of mine with an old orchard needed to clear a better path to the lower side, so out came about 15 fully grown haskap bushes that he just gave away. For the rest of us that may not even have half of that it may sound horrible but trust me, there are plenty where those came from. He also cleared a few apple trees in order to accommodate some plums.
No. You’d be quite sane. Go with what works. And if it tastes good—and I’ll admit to liking pears (both Euro and Asian) much more than apples----so much the better! I’ve planted more (disease-resistant) pears than any other fruit tree. I’d be on easy street if Kentucky springs weren’t such blossom killers. Pretty good pear year this year, though.
If you’ve not got one yet, be sure to put out an Ayers pear. That’s one fine—and very disease-resistant—sugar pear. Ayers is my second most anticipated fruit this year—just after watermelons!
I’m the opposite. I ripped out 3 3yo pears this year due to them being fireblight magnets even though I spray streptomycin. 2 asian and surprisingly a Moonglow. I replaced with a couple peaches I started from store bought peaches. If they don’t produce anything edible, I’ll just put something else in their place as well.
We get a good amount of apples in our neighborhood and they do well here. That being said I have ripped out my fair share of plants because they were not thriving or I did not care for it.
I’m going down a similar path. For me I’m removing stone fruit to put in pears. On the east coast it’s just to much effort to have a lot of them. The remaining stone fruit trees are being converted to franken trees. Putting in a lot of work and money for a percentage of the crop just is not worth it
On the apples though. I’ve notice some are easier than others.
My thinking is this, will those pests attack your pears once their favorite targets were gone? I planted apples and pears together. I’ve noticed that plum curculio, coddling moths, oriental fruit moths, etc. prefer apples to pears. However, I have seen damages from them in pears, too.
While I like Euro pears a lot, I still am struggling with when to pick them, which varieties need to be refrigerated and for how long, etc. after several years, I still have not gotten the picking and refrigerating quite right.
Asian pears are straight forward. Fruit ripened, eat them. They last quite a few months in a fridge. But not everyone likes Asian pears.
Right!? Gotta grow your own. The mush bags in the store are rarely mediocre. Man… I miss my hosui, chojuro KG, and Yoinashi. However, in addition to those Asians, I got seuri, shinsui, daisuili, shinli, kosui mishirasu, raja, Ooharabeni, and a couple others
I have a couple asian Pear grafts that do well for me. Maybe I should add more. Sometimes they get hit with cedar quince rust and the fruit are ruined. Oh well.