Happy Pear Trees

How are your fruit trees responding to climate change where you are?

We are in the centre of our isles, central England.  Our garden has an own root stock pear tree that I think mist be over 50 years old.  I will take & add a picture of the whole tree later.

I don't know the variety, but I'm starting to suspect "Louise Bonne" (via Jersey, d'Avranches )due to the shape and blush.  I need to study whether it's a spur or tip bearer to test this theory.

Many years, we've had poor harvests and the leaves have suffered from rust. But in the hotter weather this year & in our record breaking 40 C summer of 2022 (with the help of a lot of buckets of bath water) we're getting bumper fruit.  

So I need to think about thinning the fruitlets next May for the first time.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up in summer pruning the water shoots (neglected over the past few years not least due to my Long COVID-19 which thankfully eased after nearly 2 years, last summer).

Just from three water shoots, we got c. 1.5 kg of underripe pears which I'm turning into a basic chutney:

I wouldn't bet on hot only years. Where i am last year was cold and wet. After 3 scorching years with long droughts. This year last frosts were very late and not mild frosts. But somehow it's a great year for fruit! It's a big chaos.
With a friend of mine we've grafted many , many trees. We've been tapping into our network, especially looking into late flowering and late fruiting varieties. The prune grafts couldn't stand all this hot weather and mostly died off, the apples did great as did the cherries, pears did ok-ish.
As amateurs we need fruit all the time and not everything early in the season, as do fruit salesmen, first crops of season=high prices, nurseries hardly care for gardeners over here, just sell us what professionals want, so we get early flowering stuff..Ridiculous in this climate chaos, but what can we do? Some apple trees here are still hanging in December. I don't know their names sadly, but the farmer gave permission to have at them and was happy to chat to conscious folk.

Here is the tree from an upstairs window, you can with some effort see that it still needs more summer pruning.

My pear trees do not seem to be negatively affected from climate change yet. This is in strong contrast to the many trees and shrubs I've seen struggle and die from the heat waves, long droughts and smoke clouds in my area over the past several years. For example, many  rhododendrons, blueberries, Douglas-firs and Western red cedars are all struggling to survive from climate change. Many forests in Oregon saw massive die offs of trees a few years ago.

I grow Bartlett, D'Anjou, Bosc, Seckel and Summer Blood Birne pears and all are producing bumper crops this year, possibly because of the complete lack of frost from March- June and abundant rainfall during this last winter. Bees were numerous and pollination seemed to go well. I only noticed a tiny amount of fire blight on one tree.

In case anyone might be interested, I'll be selling pears next month, along with lots of other fruit. Please purple mooseage me for more info.

Hugo Morvan wrote:I wouldn't bet on hot only years. Where i am last year was cold and wet. After 3 scorching years with long droughts. This year last frosts were very late and not mild frosts. But somehow it's a great year for fruit! It's a big chaos.

Oh, indeed: big chaos is right.  Climate change includes reduced reliability, more pendulum-ing between extremes.  But that's where polycultures and biodiversity come in: a better support network, and more chance something will do well in the extremes.

Hugo Morvan wrote: With a friend of mine we've grafted many , many trees. We've been tapping into our network, especially looking into late flowering and late fruiting varieties. The prune grafts couldn't stand all this hot weather and mostly died off, the apples did great as did the cherries, pears did ok-ish.  As amateurs we need fruit all the time and not everything early in the season. Some apple trees here are still hanging in December. I don't know their names sadly, but the farmer gave permission to have at them and was happy to chat to conscious folk.

Sounds like a fantastic project.  As you say, so important to have that diversity of cropping times.  I wonder if the farmer knows the varieties of those apples?

By contrast, here's an unhappy pear tree.

This is on our new Community Allotment Garden.  Although I know the previous tenant, who had it as a personal allotment garden, I don't know any of the varieties of the perennial fruit trees etc. they planted.

The two grafted dwarf rootstock pear trees (probably both the same variety, not 100% sure though), both flowered excellently and set lots of fruit this Spring.

But by the time I realised what was happening, we'd lost almost the entire crop to pear midge (Contarina pyrivora).

The midges apparently emerge as adults in early to mid spring from pupae in the ground, and lay eggs in the blossoms.  The grubs destroy the fruit from the inside, whilst the leaves may look perfectly healthy.   The grubs then go dormant in the ground until the following year.

As we're aiming for no agrochemicals, and we didn't realise what was happening until the grubs were already dormant in the ground, our first step is to try to disrupt their life cycle there.   Today, we carefully hoed around the base of the tree (watching out for tree roots!) and then heavily mulched with roughly composted clean garden trimmings (from another garden with no pear trees!).  It's a bit tricky, because apparently the grubs can go as far as 3in into the soil, and the tree roots are shallow in places.  I'm hoping that if we build up to 6+ inches of  compost, that will greatly reduce the number which successfully emerge.  

We've been advised to try hoeing again when the ground is unfrozen in early winter, but I'm concerned the cold will do as much damage to the pear tree roots as to the pupae.  Another advised strategy is to use sheet mulch from late winter to try to stop the midges from emerging.  

But our main strategy will be carefully observing the blossoms and fruitlets next spring, and immediately removing and destroying which show any signs of midge.  

Hopefully in two years time, we will get a better crop of pears from these trees thereby!

Suggestions online are that Williams Bon Chretien, Packham’s Triumph, and Beth variety are particularly susceptible to pear midge. Potentially less susceptible may be Concorde, Doyenne du Comice and Onward.

Image: A grafted dwarf rootstock pear tree (variety currently unknown) with a raspberry growing up from the root.  Rough composted garden prunings as a ring mulch.