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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] runting out a pear

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  • From: "Kieran and/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>
  • To: <fuwafuwausagi@muchomail.com>, "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] runting out a pear
  • Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:28:12 -0500


Hey Fluff,
I have a question for you. If God were to take spread some crap soil like you say, nasty clay a hundred miles wide and about 15 feet deep in our case, do you think it would runt out pears on Calleryana? I have seen a few biggish pear trees on the Highland Rim clay soils, but nothing like what I used to see over in the Tennessee Valley on much less impervious soils. Do I need to stop trying to make the soil better?
On a nearby property there are wild pears galore, mostly pyrifolia. I have read that pyrifolia isn't suitable rootstock for either European or Asian pears, but not why. (You have to wonder that the Asians did when all they had was their own trees....) Anyway, it seems that the thorns are bigger on the pyrifolia than on the calleryana so I can kind of tell them apart and seems like my grafts have done better on calleryana volunteers than on pyrifolia. I can select oversized bareroot calleryana rootstocks for 35 cents apeice from a local nursery so don't have a lot of incentive to mailorder OHXF 333 for 10X the price. Any comments on tree size, what to expect? Or are you too far north for calleryana? Thanks. Donna

P.S. Fluff, the references to what your native soil can do are frankly sickening. Have a little mercy for those of us Nafexers who were obviously bad in a former life and have to live in the Southeast. And I will take this moment to apologize to someone Way Up North for when I translated her ripening date on something to 6 weeks earlier to fit our climate. She responded, yeah, rub it in. Sorry. If it makes you feel any better, we have just spent the last 2 months drenched in sweat night and day. I guess if we were to take fruit oriented political correctness too far we could become just as homogenized and useless as the gardening advice that appears in magazines.



Doreen:

I am not sure is you want to dwarf a pear tree or an orchards worth.

If you only need to dwarf out a couple you can do what I did which worked well and keeps them around 8 feet. Start with OHxF 282 or 333 which as the wondrous Ed mentioned will give you a 12-15 foot tree(unless you plant seckle in which case you are now done). Next plant in crap soil, I brought in a bunch of nasty clay and it goes down about 3 feet and I spread it about 16-20 feet long and 8 feet wide for 3 trees. Fifteen year later we are still talking about productive 8-9 footers. I have Harvest Queen and Harrow Sweet growing beside my driveway this way. I did this to stop the issue with the roots cracking the driveway. And predictably i dwarfed them out nice.

In my native soil those same trees woudl probably by closer to 18 feet as are the Potomca, Magness, Atlantic Queen, Resuce and Bosc I am currently cutting down (in the power lines).

fluffy







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