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Looking for Pear Scion Wood

 
Posts: 182
Location: The Ozarks
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Hi folks. I have had great success grafting "wild" bradford / Callery pear trees. Over the last 3 years I have grafted probably about 30 trees and I think there are about 25 or so that have taken off and done great. This is also the first year that I have done some gorilla grafting. I have been using a Bartlett and one other thick skinned unknown variety. I would like to branch out a bit and get some more varieties going. I am particularly interested in getting my hands on some perry (cider) scion wood. I have around 30 more trees on my property that need to be grafted and literally thousands that are growing in fence rows and other unmaintained areas. My first graft put on it's first pear this year so I want to put some more work into this.

I would like to ramp up my grafting for the spring of 2018. Do any of you have any interesting varieties that you would be interested in sending me?

I have never bought scion wood, can someone make some recommendations on where and how to do that?
 
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https://www.fedcoseeds.com/trees/?cat=Scionwood has some; order early.  At the moment they seem to have dropped plums and ALL of the pear scions (bottom of page as of 11/5/2017) they offer are perry varieties!?  They are a solid company but in Maine, so if you live in a warm climate, theirs may not be the best adapted.  You can usually order small numbers of sticks from the USDA germplasm repository in Corvallis, OR, which has some really obscure types, not only delicious heirlooms, but also crazy mutants with striped bark & fruit (Bon Louise de Avranchees Panache or something like that; dessert fruit but fishy smelling blooms), red fleshed pears (mostly summer ripening & poor for storage) and one apple pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) from the Russian Far East that is as acidic as a lemon (and called a "rootstock pear," but I would cook with it as I find most Asian pears too bland and in fact welcome acidity).  They have reorganized their search page and I find it difficult to use now, but they do stock fireblight resistant and low chill varieties if those are relevant to you.  I suspect Asians will be more compatible with Callery roots than are Europeans.  They have both.  They even have sorbopears if you want to go really weird (but those have different looking foliage, so you lose stealth in your guerrilla campaign).

Unfortunately while I am better at budding than whip grafting, nearly everyone ships just dormant scions for the later (winter and earliest spring) because of course dormancy helps things survive transit.  Browse now & order early
 
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