North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

Mark wrote,  "The wholesale nurseries just want to get rid of trees....So 
when Wal-Mart(plug in your favorite box store)orders 5000 Georgia Belles for 
their Midwest stores, my theory is the
nursery may only have 2000 Georgia Belles, but fills the rest of the order
with whatever they have."


Sorry Mark, but your theory is backwards to the real situation, as explained 
to me by UT's horticulture expert, David Lockwood.  He says that when the 
nurserys package up their remaining trees and sell them in bulk to the 
package stores, the stores say, "Don't put labels on them, we'll put our own 
labels on them."  Of course, since it's difficult or more like impossible to 
tell one variety from another, they just stick on thousands of labels that 
say "Bartlett pear" or "Granny Smith apple" and years later all the pears 
are Kieffer and all the apples are RD.
   The funniest one I have personally experienced was a package orchard 
that had been planted by friends of friends, and the friend took me out 
there to pick grapes after the fof had put the place up for sale and moved 
away.  I was noticing how many of the little pear trees had fireblight, and 
noticed one tree that looked sort of like a pear, certainly not like any 
other fruit tree, and I wondered aloud what it was.  My friend said it was a 
Bartlett pear.  I said no it wasn't.  She said it was, I said it wasn't, and 
finally she got mad and said, "I know it's a Bartlett because it's got a 
label on it that says so!"  And sure enough there was such a label.  So I 
looked at it and at all the others and said, "Whatever it is, it's not a 
Bartlett."  It was the only one there with no blight at all.  I wonder about 
that scene now and then, if it was the first Bradford pear I ever saw, or if 
it was just a poplar.  I wasn't all that familiar with pears at the time, 
but David Lockwood had told me that he'd never seen a living Bartlett tree 
over 4 years old in Tennessee.   I meet people all the time who think they 
have a Bartlett pear tree.
   Other interesting things I have seen were 4 grafted pecans on sale half 
price, and I looked carefully to find that all 4 had failed grafts.  Someone 
else saw a willow tree labeled as a cherry.     Donna