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).