gonebananas, After two seasons in upstate NY I found the Stacey pear to be the most hardy and extremely vigorous pear. We have a dozen different pear trees growing. St Lawrence sells Stacey and they say it is the the sturdiest pear in the orchard. I'd use Stacy for the base on a multi grafted tree.
When you grow one you see the difference.

Hello Gonebananas.

I think you and I are in much the same boat, so I'll tell you what I've done, and others can chime in and you can pick and choose.

I went to a good orchardist and got his opinion on a healthy (FB resistant) pear for this area; he recommended a Gold Spice on OH x F333, which I bought as a fairly good sized bareroot. It already had a substantial central leader and several scaffold branches.

I grafted several varieties to the scaffolds, mostly doing whip and tongue and cleft grafts with a few chip backups.

It's been an enthusiastic little tree, offering lots of new scaffold opportunities to choose from, and pushing the grafts out nicely. The year I planted it I got a dozen pears from it; the following year, thanks to cold spells and poor germination, I didn't get any, and this year I look to get about seven, including a couple from grafts. I think I have nine varieties on it now.

I've kept it to 12 feet in height by thinning back the central leader to the least competitive competitor. It's getting a little bushy this year and I expect to shift it over to summer pruning, following Don's good advice, this year and next. I think I've allowed it to fill in a little too much, and I should probably cut out some of the scaffolds entirely, but that's a whole 'nother story.

I would probably not choose to graft to the leader directly, as epicormal growth on larger stock just isn't as strong (I know, most fruit trees are bud grafted to their rootstock!) I do favor grafting to scaffolding (framework) branches but like to do it about a foot from the leader and put a backup bud or chip behind it. But as I understand it, closer to the trunk is better. If you choose to bud you can get a start just a couple of inches from the trunk, and that will work, but if you do a cleft or a w&t you'll want a few inches of wiggle room, in my experience. I did start grafting to my new pear as soon as I got it in the ground.

I'm not against putting two or three varieties on a scaffold branch, but right now I lean towards keeping it simple. I have an apple with a couple of dozen varieties on it and I find myself poking around in it ("Now where did I put that Snow? Wasn't it over here next to this scrap of Fuji I didn't want to throw away?"), that kind of thing. My pear is much better organised, and I think I'll be able to maintain and update it much better as I enter my dotage.

I don't know about Kiefer but pears in general are pretty user friendly when it comes to grafting. If you want a Kiefer as your rootstock I'll bet you can make it work- and failure's just another excuse to go back and play some more, ay? If you keep at it you'll get it!

This is just my experience with this one tree in western Montana- your mileage will surely vary.

Good luck,

Mark

Thanks both for the useful information.

"Stacey" was almost raved about in an old classic book on pears. I believe it was in Tukey, H.B, 1928, THE PEAR AND IT'S CULTURE: DESIGNED FOR BOTH THE AMATEUR AND THE COMMERCIAL GROWER. It showed a ancient huge productive but totally untended "Stacey" tree. I have never heard of it being grown in the south though, but have wanted to try it, mainly based on the book's comments on disease resistance.

It is this same old literature that mentions established Kiefer (sp?) as not accepting or maintaining grafts well, but who knows at what age they meant. It may have related to topworking orchard trees. Which, by the way, reminds me that using an eating selection as the main trunk and scaffold or framework branches was once fairly common (i.e., the more-dispersed type of topworking).

I like the idea of normal grafting with a chip backup. Both then require that at least the base of the scaffold branches are of the trunk variety and assure that the connection with the trunk is completely natural and presumably very strong.

Epicormic? Dam, I used to know what that meant.

If your issue is fireblight then your only smart choice is to maintain the fireblight resistant variety as the central leader and build your scaffolds from the less resistant varieties. This will reduce your potential injury I would think.

The advantages of building a 2 or 3 variety tree from grafting to the central leader is the branches from each tier will be of equal vigor making managment easier. It also affords you the opportunity to graft decreasingly less vigorous varieties as you go up which is a huge boon to easy managment of a central leader pyramid shape (sparse christmas tree). This is very helpful with apples, probably not so much for pears.

By "grafting to the central leader" I mean continuing the central leader with a different variety.

Several years ago I chose Kieffer upon which to graft 7 varieties of Asian pears. The grafts all took easily and have each grown well with an average of about 10 pears per variety this year. The tree has 2 central leaders (grafted Asians) with the rest of the Asians and Keiffer as scaffolds. I did have one suspected hit of fireblight this season on one of the central leaders, but all has gone well since.

Glad I didn't know about that Keiffer reputation, 'cause I've got a young Keiffer tree that's serving as 'foster home' to a dozen or more varieties 'til I can get around to putting them on their own rootstock. Never experienced any indication that it was 'unwilling' to accept any scion I stuck on it.

Now, with regard to branch structure for a multi-variety tree, in my limited experience, I'd be inclined to use Seckel or Warren for my framework - for a pear, both seem to have exceptionally good branch angles - they don't tend to 'shoot skyward' from a narrow origination point. As an added bonus, any Warren(or Magness) branches that you might leave ungrafted, will be more likely to bear fruit because of being surrounded by branches of varieties that are attractive to pollenizers.
I just used my Keiffer 'cause it was handy and I had a larger tree of that variety already fruiting.

Come to think of it, I've heard of building a pear with 4 codominant leaders so if one goes down to FB you're still in business. Can't remember the plan as far as whether rope is used to prevent leaders from splitting apart when under cropload.

Up here in southwestern NY firebligt hasn't ever become an existential issue with any pear I manage. Bosc is the only pear I've ever even had to disfigure while cutting FB away and this on only 2 sites of very many. Psyla is my big bugaboo here.

In the coastal west my sister gets annual FB on her Seckel pear so it's interesting that in KY it is resistant.

H-man's teasing me 'cause I learned a new word :-) ...

Well, it's not my fault. The local city arborist stopped by our place a while back and used it, and I had to ask him what it means; ever since I've been waiting for a chance to try it out!! Giving a new word to me is like outfitting a 12 year old with a new watch- he's going to be looking for every excuse to check the time.

I think it may have been Konrad who recommended successive grafts to the central leader, but he made it sound like you added one every year or two, I don't know for sure. Does somebody remember? And I'm trying to recall who suggests doing multigraft pears on a vase so that you can remove entire sections, if need be, without the risk of losing the whole tree. I thought it might be Aceofspades, but mebbe not. I have trouble keeping everybody straight. Obviously.

Anyhow, thanks for the discussion.

Best,

M

To make a multi-variety leader my way, you put on one new variety a year until you make a max of 3 tiers. I usually just do 2 varieties to a tree so I can keep the branches from deer without having to go too high to pick. In other words instead of a low tier I have 4' of trunk. Just make sure you put the least vigorous variety on top.

Thanks Marknut for making me laugh and taking my comment with a light heart.

h-man,
Seckel is reputed to be FB-resistant - but not immune.
Mine rocked along unfazed for about 10 years - until it bloomed - then FB hit and almost killed it back to the graft before I got ahead of it. It was growing back nicely before it fell to the bulldozer last fall when my wife decided to put in a tennis court and took out a dozen or so bearing-age apples & pears.

Yeah, I know Seckel is considered resistant. I just thought it was interesting that in some sites it may be more resistant than others. I'm wondering if vulnerability to FB doesn't get a little complicated and one variety might be more susceptible than another in one environment while the other is more so in another environment. Or that there may be no resistance in flowers but more resistance in larger wood. In my sisters tree the FB doesn't move on to larger wood so it doesn't kill it but productivity is seriously reduced.

If it is only the flowers and very small wood of Seckel that tends to get blighted then it would make a great foundation as Lucky suggested. It has the best form of any pear I grow by far.

Agreed. Seckel has(had) a very pleasing branching habit with good angles. My Warren pear is similar in habit - good branch angles.

There's no doubt in my mind that FB pressure is worse in some locations than others; whether or not there some strains of the Erwinia bacteria that are more virulent than others, I don't know.

No, that's not what I meant. Of course FB in general is a worse problem in some areas than others. What I wonder is whether there is some variation in the relative susceptability from variety to variety when exposed to different environmental conditions. In other words, in coastal CA Seckel might be more vunerable than another variety that is more susceptable in KY.

I've read it rumored that "Seckel's" reputed resistance to FB is more from an offset in timing of flowering, that it is simply less likely to be exposed to FB by pollinators coming from other selections but that it is susceptible if it is exposed. I have no experience or opinion in the matter yet.

I like that explanation, it would explain why its susceptability would be variable in different ways then other pears that bloom later. It's about climate conditions at time of bloom instead of an actual resistance in the tissue to the pathogen.

I have little experience with plant pathology, but from the non-trivial amount of microbiology I've had I would find it highly likely that some strains of FB have a different profile of predilection for different varieties of pear. The antigens on the surface of one pear can differ from another, and the antigens that need to interact with them on FB can differ. How significant this effect is in current FB populations is obviously unknown, but the likelihood of that sort of thing happening to some non-zero extent is greater than it not happening at all.

Sure, but the tendency of a pear to flower earlier than others is a very logical explanation for a variation in FB suscpeptibility. The weather would not tend to be as warm and humid when Seckel is in bloom. Where my sister is it is always humid and Seckel usually gets some FB die-back.

Still, it is strange that with the variability of weather in the south that earlier flowering would have a significant affect of reducing the incidence of FB. A patch of hot humid weather can come from early spring on with only a gradual increase of probability of such weather occuring.

I guess I'll give at least equal probability to variations in the pathogen itself. Of course this is coming from someone with no actual expertise in plant pathology beyond trying to control it.