'Dwarfed' fruit on pears

18 years ago

Our local county extension agent is a horticulturist who discusses things horticultural on the radio and in the paper every week. This week she not so much answered a question as asked one, and I thought I would bring it to the board.

It concerns a number of very small pear fruit that were brought to her by different people last summer. Healthy trees were fully pollinated and set fruit happily, but the fruit never reached full size.

Fire blight and other diseases were ruled out on the bases of vascular health and simple visual observation.

The horticulturist suspected a calcium problem, caused not by a lack of calcium in the soil, but by irrigation problems during a particularly nasty hot spell -which is certainly plausible, but note she doesn't claim it's the case, just that it might be.

My pear took last year off all together and the pear I babysit seemed normal enough, so I have no personal experience here, and didn't see any of the specimens. But I thought somebody here might share their experiences.

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your help.

Best,

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Comments (4)

scaper_austin
18 years ago
Hello,
I would love to get more info out this dwarfed pear as I love a good mystery. Could it be that the tree was simply overcropped and not thinned enough. Also in my area old home by farmingdale #333 can dwarf certain pears. Calcium is a possibility as well. Any chance we could get more info?

Thanks,
Drew
marknmt
Original Author
18 years ago
Hi, Drew. Thanks for your response.

I will call the horticulturist today and see if she can come up with any more information.

I don't know what rootstocks the stunted pears were on, but I gather that more than one person brought samples in. There are a lot of unknown pears around here. But these were evidently from trees that had previously born normal fruits.

It's certainly a good possibility that the trees were overgrown and overcropped. Hadn't even occurred to me.

Thanks again- I'll try to bring more information later today.

M
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scaper_austin
18 years ago
Hello,
More info would be great. You know there are alot of things that could cause this problem but it is really strange that there are multiple cases of this problem. This is a true pear mystery. I wonder if anyone paying attention to this post has ever seen this before?

Thanks,
Drew
marknmt
Original Author
18 years ago
Hi Drew-

Talked to the extension people this week and learned:

1. There was one sample brought in, not several. But, there were several people describing the same symptom to the horticulturist anecdotally. There is a lot of room for error here, so after I learned that I assumed that there should be a large fudge factor built in.

2. The sample that did come in was sent to the Plant Pathology Clinic at MSU in Bozeman and they simply said it wasn't sick, but they didn't know why it was so small.

We did have a nasty hot spell during the summer. I think it hit 105 F several -a few?- days in a row, and a lot of things were showing stress. My apples did fine, but we were overwatering, if anything. (My youngish pear didn't fruit last year.) So it's easy for me to imagine that it was related to that, and the idea of insufficient calcium, or somethin' sounds plausible to me, but I'm ignorant in the matter.

Have I ever seen this before? Well, I only got into pears a few years ago, but I do think I've seen large pear trees, overloaded with tiny fruit, and wondering why it all was so small. Once again, it's easy for me to imagine that if you take a large tree, fail to prune it, let it overcrop and then subject it to extremes of temperature that you'll get undersized fruit.

But if that happens to my pampered baby I'll be a little less relaxed about it!

Best,

M