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Posts Tagged ‘pears’
Choose a Fruit Tree for Your Small Kitchen Garden
October 2, 2008 | 
Author With my last post, Your Small Kitchen Garden started a mission to plant a pear tree this fall. Yesterday, when I made a grocery run, I stopped at a gardening store and was able to establish that Lewisburg, PA subscribes to the culture of “plant perennials in the spring;” there will be no pear trees—or any other fruit trees available until March.
This flies in the face of my philosophy (shared by many gardeners): planting in autumn has distinct advantages. The folks at the garden store were very helpful, offering up the name and location of the nursery from which they purchase trees, but by the time I drive there and back, I’ll have spent at least $25 for gasoline.
So, today I have no tree to plant, but I’m making phone calls to local garden stores and nurseries. Why all this hassle rather than click over to an on-line nursery?
Buy Fruit Trees Locally
I choose to buy locally whenever I can for the age-old reason: it supports the local business-owners. In small-town anywhere, local businesses need the support. But when it comes to planting fruit trees, I want as much control over my selection as possible.
When I order a plant on-line, I trust the seller will package up something healthy that is likely to survive if I treat it well. What I can’t be sure of is whether I’m going to like the shape of the tree they send.
This peach tree came from the nursery with a vertical trunk and a near-horizontal extension. The entire crown was (and still is) at the end of the horizontal extension. It’ll be four or five more seasons of pruning to correct the idiotic shape.
Shape Matters
The shape of a tree matters to me when I’m working around it. For example, when I’m mowing the lawn, I don’t want to bend over to mow closely to a tree. I also don’t want tree branches so low that the only way to mow under them is to stand away from the tree, and repeatedly shove the mower under, pull it back, and shove it under.
When a fruit tree has shoulder-level branches in the spring, those same branches are likely to hang down to knee- or ankle-level when laden with fruit. Mowing around them then can damage the fruit, knock fruit off the tree, and even break the already-stressed branches.
So, my ideal tree shape is a little odd: a branch-free trunk up to about five-and-a-half feet, and then a kind of flat disk of branches radiating around the trunk. In other words, I’d like to have mushroom-shaped fruit trees (I still have to duck under the branches, but I don’t have to bend low).
Truly Dwarf Trees
Were I planting a particularly small dwarf-variety of tree, I’d put far less emphasis on the tree’s shape. I would simply maintain a large circle of mulch around a tree whose crown diameter was six to ten feet. Then the first branch could start six inches up the tree’s trunk and I’d be happy.
But, I’m not planting a dwarf pear tree if I can avoid it. So, I want a tree I can prune into a shape that makes me happy. Were I there to choose the tree in person, it would have a straight trunk running vertically up to a healthy leader—with, perhaps, a bump where the leader was grafted onto root stock. If I end up buying through mail-order there’s no guarantee I’ll get a tree shaped like this.
Grafted? Root Stock? What?
Details about how your fruit tree is assembled are only slightly important to your success in growing it. But, it never hurts to understand what the store owners are telling you when they throw industry jargon your way. So, in my next post I’ll explain how the nursery operators assemble fruit trees, and how that can result in odd shapes, dwarfs, unwanted growth, and unfortunate tree failure.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | 
Tags: fruit, fruit trees, grafting, pears, plant fruit | 
9 Comments »
Harvesting Pears: An Anecdote
In my yard there is a pear tree that was part of the small kitchen garden that came with our house. (If I’d started this blog then, it would have been called Your Small Home Orchard.) The first year I harvested pears from that tree, they were terrible. In an earlier blog post, Harvesting Pears, I explained a simple solution that I learned years ago, probably from an article in the local newspaper. But, before I learned the correct way to harvest pears, no way was I going to let those horrid fruits go to waste.
So, contrary to the spirit of Your Small Kitchen Garden, I harvested those horrid pears when they were dead-ripe, sliced them into little bits, cooked them till their juice ran free, and strained that juice through a tee shirt so I could make a few quarts of pear jelly.
Hot tip of the day:
- If you grow fruit trees because you absolutely need to have fruit in your small kitchen garden
AND…
- If you end up with way more fruit than you can possibly consume during the growing season OR You’d never actually eat the fruit because it’s ucky
AND…
- You can rustle up the gear
Then Make Jelly
With pears, it’s a balancing act between what we’ll eat and what will simply be too much. I wait for the first pear to fall, then I pick several dozen of the nicest ones for cold-storage ripening. The rest, I leave on the tree to ripen naturally. These I’ll use to make jelly.
This year, Mother Nature has thrown a curve ball. Here’s where the anecdote starts:
It’s dinner time, and we’re all sitting on the screened porch chewing and chatting. Earlier in the day, I’ve learned that a lot of people have read my blog entry about harvesting pears, and I comment about it now; I mention that I plan to pick our pears when the first one drops from the tree.
With that statement, I look across the yard at the tree and see a squirrel jump from the ground onto the tree’s trunk. The squirrel scrambles into the branches, and moments later a pear falls to the ground! As I proclaim annoyance, the squirrel charges down the tree, pounces on the pear, spends a few seconds with it, and then romps back up into the tree.
The Thieving Varmint
On this trip up the tree, the squirrel (whom I can see clearly through the entire caper) squats on a branch on its hind legs, holds a pear with its front feet, and quickly gnaws through the pear’s stem. Moments later, the wily rodent charges down the tree and bounds across the lawn with my pear in its mouth; with its pear in its mouth.
By my measure, the first pear had dropped. The next morning, I picked all the pears I thought the family might eat, and left several dozen on the tree. And don’t you know? The squirrel returned for another pear during our next dinner on the screened porch. In fact, I’ve seen the squirrel steal pears many times since I posted that blog entry; it seems to be taunting me: plucking pears while I’m dining on the porch.
How to Stop a Squirrel
I understand that squirrels aren’t great connoisseurs of pears. Supposedly, they eat pears and other fruits when water isn’t available–and so it isn’t this growing season. We’re not in drought in central Pennsylvania, but I’d guess we’ve had less than an inch of rain in the past six weeks—maybe in more than two months.
I could divert the squirrel from its pilfering ways simply by leaving a dish of water for it someplace near the pear tree. But I won’t. I enjoy watching it during dinner, and a quart or two of jelly is a small price to pay.
Harvesting Pears
Why is a blog about your small kitchen garden talking about harvesting pears? Pears grow on trees, so how can they qualify for a small kitchen garden? Well… when it comes to home-grown fruit, you have to stretch some rules: if you want home-grown pears, the smallest thing you can grow to get them is a tree. For many of us, there’s an even simpler excuse: we moved to houses that had pear trees growing in the yard, and it seems a shame to let the fruit go to waste.
OK, but have you bitten into one of those pears, picked fresh-ripe from your tree? Did it make you wonder what’s wrong with the tree? Did you think, perhaps, that you got stuck with an inferior plant?
The hard truth is actually good news: picking a ripe pear and biting into it can be really disappointing. A pear that ripens on the tree often develops unevenly: there may be hard spots among the soft. As well, a tree-ripened pear may be grainy—as if there is sand sprinkled through it.
Here’s the good part: you can get terrific fruit from your pear tree.
Getting perfect pears
When your pears start to look big enough to eat, pay enough attention to notice when one falls off the tree. This usually happens before the pears are ripe. At this point, pick all of them. Stack the newly-picked, still green pears in a refrigerator where they can stay for a month or so without interfering with your life. Your mission is to keep the pears at about 40 degrees.
After four or more weeks, take several pears out of the refrigerator and leave them at room temperature for two or three days—or until they’re ripe. As you consume the first set of pears, remove several more from cold-storage, and set them to ripen at room temperature. When you bite into a pear harvested and stored this way, you’ll gain considerable appreciation for that pear tree in your yard.
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