North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

I have Winter Nelis.  It's a wonderful  fruit, and a horrible tree.  The fruit is wonderfully buttery, sweet and juicy and keeps better than any other pear.  With most pears, if you take them out of cold storage, they start to ripen and you can't stop the process.  With WN, take them out, and put them back and they go back into "sleep" and continue to hold.  
The down side is that the tree has a horrible brushy "witch's broom" growth habit combined with the worst susceptability to pear aphid I've ever seen, and the tree is always covered with black sooty mold that grows on the aphid "honey dew".  I knew a very good commercial grower who kept a couple trees for himself, but wouldn't plant them to grow because they were too hard to handle.  I have a tree of it, but it's such a mess I almost never get fruit.
In short, don't grow it unless you put it on a very dwarf stock and spray the living daylights out of it.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003.
On Dec 21, 2005, at 11:46 AM, tanis cuff wrote:

Maybe a year ago someone posted to the list a request for info either about 
this pear, or where to acquire it.  If this is still a Q, I've found both.  
(If you can get into the GRIN collections database, that's more than half.)