January is the start of fruit-tree time, a brief window of opportunity for gardeners to snatch up bare-root seedlings at bargain prices. But if low-grade soil is keeping you from jumping on the backyard-orchard bandwagon, consider the pear tree.
“Pears like soil so heavy, no other trees will survive in it,” says C. Todd Kennedy, a fruit historian and co-partner of the Arboreum Co., which specializes in heirloom cultivars. “They like everything except light or sandy soil.”
That’s good news for gardeners who’ve tried everything short of a jackhammer to loosen up the clay commonly found in the Bay Area. No need for amendments when cultivating pears. With full sun and irrigation in the spring and summer, they’ll produce an abundant crop. Areas with warm summers and cool but not frigid winters are ideal environments. Coastal areas are spared the ravages of fire blight, the primary pear bacterial disease that thrives on heat. Trees can be planted into March.
You can load up on your knowledge and fruit varieties at scion exchanges, an annual winter tradition hosted by California Rare Fruit Growers chapters in January and February at Bay Area venues (see box). Fruit cuttings, seedlings, tree grafting, workshops, one-on-one consultations, fruit samplings and other offerings are available at the events.
Pear myths
Kennedy, the state fruit registrar for the California Rare Fruit Growers, dispels another myth about pears: that cross-pollination between two varieties is necessary for a harvest. Not so, he maintains. “Generally in the Bay Area, in suburban areas there’s enough pear trees here and there for pollination – if your tree is in bloom, some other trees will be in bloom.”
Even though pears aren’t favored by bees, flies can help pollinate, because they are attracted to the fish-oil-like smell in pear blooms, Kennedy says. A young tree purchased from a nursery will produce fruit in two to four years.
Pears require up to 800 hours of winter chill annually – the amount of time when temperatures fall below 45 degrees – to set fruit.
“San Francisco is an incredible place for growing pears,” says Freddy Menge, a Santa Cruz County grower of heirloom fruit. A past officer of the CRFG Monterey Bay chapter, Menge helped organize a Santa Cruz tasting last fall that featured 25 European early to midseason varieties and seven Asian pears native to Korea, Japan and China.
Organizers came up with the idea for the tasting to give meaning to the endless rows of scions – the wood of the cultivar that you want to root or put on wood stock – offered at the exchanges (see box).
Most people are familiar with store-bought pears such as ‘Bartlett’, ‘Doyenne du Comice’ (a.k.a. ‘Comice’), ‘Bosc’, ‘Anjou’, ‘Warren’, ‘Seckel’, and although they may not know it, ‘Packham’s Triumph’, an Australian seedling of ‘Bartlett’ that bears lumpy fruit. That’s but a drop in the bucket.
Thousands of varieties
About 1,000 varieties of named, edible pears – and 2,000 wild types – are housed at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Ore., the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pyrus collection site.
In the Bay Area, Woodside’s Filoli estate maintains nearly 140 varieties, some in the trellis form known as espalier. For more than a century, pears have been an established headliner at Filoli, and its horticulture director, Lucy Tolmach, doesn’t hesitate to name her favorite:
“Hands down, the ‘Doyenne du Comice’ is the variety to choose. It is the most spectacular of existing trees, it is delicious, it keeps well and it is fragrant.” And she is not done yet: “It has lovely bark, beautiful white blossoms in spring, it is healthy, and it produces lots of fruit, and it melts in your mouth.”
Depending on the variety, pears will mature in summer, fall or winter. Generally, the early ones such as ‘Bartlett’, ‘Warren’, ‘Orcas’, ‘Rescue’, ‘Highland’, ‘Clapp’s Favorite’ and ‘Gorham’, can be eaten right off the tree, Kennedy says.
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