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Hi Vic,
I was often told by someone
from East Europe that pears were always planted from seeds. Only recently, have
they become involved with specifically named variety which are grafted. In
Western Europe (i.e., France, etc.), it was different.
Hélène Dessureault
Hi Donna,
I don't know how much help
this is. I have an old book entitled 'Old Salem Gardens.' It's at home and
I'm at the store so I won't be quoting. It deals with the 'gentlemanly'
hobby in old Salem, MA, of growing and propagating fruit, especially pears.
They claim in the book that this was often done from seed, as pears were
considered reliable producers of fruit similar to the parent trees. This
sounds like a situation unlike that of propagating apples from seed. I don't
know if it is true. They also dabbled at splicing seeds as a way of crossing
varieties. I wonder if their 'success' in this was actually the germ growing
and it's differences not being due to the splicing, in other words, that the
result would have been the same without splicing the seed. Does anyone know
if there is any validation for this? It would seem pretty far fetched in a
time not so technologically advanced, and if it had worked, wouldn't
we still be playing with the process?
Anyway, I can check, but I don't
recall anything about sour pears. There did seem to be something about perry
though.
As far as your stump, you may want to put in some bark grafts to
sprout in the event you don't get suckers or that you don't get them soon
enough to help the rise and fall of the sap and therefore keep the roots fed
so you don't lose the specimen.
Good luck, will forward anything else I
can find in the old book.............vic
Kieran or Donna wrote:
I have enjoyed the discussion of whether
to make Pomona available to the public, but now I have a real fruit tree
question. Fall of 99 I mentioned an "old sour pear"
tree. That's what the locals call it, it made a lumpy looking pear
that was indeed rather too sour to enjoy (it was edible though, cooked,
with plenty of cream and sugar added). Well, it was in the way of
a small pond, so I marked it and we did some, uh, Tennessee style
pruning on it. The fellow doing the excavation cut it off a foot
high and dug it up for me. ( The shape was hopeless, straight up,
splitting about 3 ft high into two main leaders) I thought we
would lift it into a wheelbarrow to move it, but my husband
laughed and said I was welcome to have a go at it. It didn't take
long to find out what he meant. At the end of the day, it was
hoisted by the excavator arm with a chain and set neatly into a hole
we'd dug.
First of all I will offer any future suckers, or maybe better yet some
scions from the cut tops, to anyone who perhaps is interested in perry
pears or whatever. It is plainly a seedling (was quite thorny in
the lower part of the tree), so there's no other quite like it.
Pears do get a little boring sometimes due to lack of acid. I will
probably have a lot of suckers and will probably leave one for a few
years, just to keep my options open. Does anyone know whether sour
pears are common among seedlings? My question is, with the trunk only a foot
high, and about 6" across, is bark grafting an option, or will I
have to wait for suckers and bud or graft em? Any and all
opinions, case histories are welcome. Also, if I bark graft, the
damage to one side of the trunk becomes relevant, whereas if I use a
sucker, it's not. So now I'm trying to remember the discussion on how to
deal with bark damage, it doesn't seem to have stuck with
me. Donna
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