Dallas Fruit and Vegetable Grower

Harvesting Pears

When is the best time to harvest pears?

In growing fruit, one of the things that has been a learning process fo rme has been identifying when the optimal time is to harvest my fruit.  There are different rules for different fruit.

Every year, I learn something new or accomplish something different, and this year, I am most excited about my pear harvest.

In Texas, and the South in general, our pears and apples can be vulnerable to fire blight.  Consequently, I do not grow European pears which are particularly vulnerable to fire blight.  I currently am growing fireblight resistant hybrid varieties such as Orient, Warren, Monterrey,  Moonglow, Pineapple, Kieffer, Seckle, and Magness.

When determining ripeness and harvesting pears, the books and experts suggest that you look at the color of the lenticels, the small pores in the skin, to turn from white to brown.  They also suggest that you feel for a little give in the skin.  When both of these occur, the pear should be mature and will ripen off the tree.

Frankly, I think determining ripeness from skin or lenticel color on a pear is pretty tough, and I don't think I am experienced enough to easily use that method.

Personally,I think one of the best indicators for me in determining ripeness is by lifting a fruit up toward the sky from the bottom in an arcing fashion (with the stem being the pivot point) to see how much give there is with the stem.  If it can come off easily from the stem, it should be ripe.  When harvesting, you should be able to lift the fruit upward and off -- don't twist or pull. If it doesn't come off easily from the stem, you should wait.

I kept an eye for fruit on the ground to determine when I needed to start watching the fruit more closely.  Our squirrels are very aggressive, however, so the mere fact that a pear is on the ground does not  necessarily mean the fruit is ripe in my garden.

Don't expect the fruit to be soft.  European pears are best ripened off the tree, so they don't become mealy.  They ripen from the core, out.  (In contrast, asian pears are ripened on the tree.)

Once harvested, I immediately chilled the fruit in my refrigerator.  After 2 weeks, I would select fruit as needed and leave it on the counter for 2 or 3 days for it to soften and get juicy.  It was perfect!

While keeping the pears in the refrigerator, I have been able to consume the harvest for a period of approximately six weeks.  After the pears were in the fridge for four weeks, I could eat them really almost immediately or after only a day on the counter.  After six weeks, I am getting near the end of my harvest.  I am not sure how long these fruit will remain edible, but I suspect another 2 to 4 weeks.

Summer Fruit: Peaches, Figs & Pears

The summer brought a bounty of fruit this year.

Early summer started with a good crop of blackberries.  The blackberries usually ripen in June and with three varieties, produce for three or four weeks.

Our blueberries produced a modest crop.  I had to replace approximately a third of the bushes last fall because of the heat and drought of the previous two years that had taken their toll.  I removed the drip lines that irrigated the blueberry bushes and replaced them with pop-up spray heads.  The drip lines were not reliably getting adequate moisture to the plants.  As a result of the spray heads, the bushes have done much better this year through the summer heat.

We had only a small plum harvest this year.  From seven trees, I probably only harvested 15 - 20 fruit.  There were several more on the trees, but the varmits got to them.  We had a huge crop of plums last year, and I think that caused the trees to take this year off to recuperate.

We will not get many apples this year.  The varmits really go after our apples.  They got almost all of the early ripening fruit.  However, I did harvest a couple of beautiful, small, red Williams Pride apples, which is a very early season variety.

Nevertheless, our peach crop was enormous.  That is the benefit of having a lot of different kinds of fruit trees and bushes.  Invariably, each year, certain fruits just will not produce anything.  As disappointing as that may be if you have some favorites, you are  almost guaranteed to be successful with other fruits in that same year if you have several kinds of fruit growing.

Whereas the plums were our banner "crop" last year, the peaches won the prize this year.

We have five mature peach trees and two  young trees.  The five mature trees really put on a show.  

The Jefferson, Springold, and Ranger trees are very vulnerable to varmits because the varmits can get to them easily without being seen or exposed.  Consequently, the birds, squirrels, and possums are fat this year from eating so many peaches.  However, the Sentinel and Redhaven are more exposed, and we were able to harvest the majority of their peaches before any animals got to them. 

The peaches ripened four weeks later than they have in prior years.   Dallas had late freezes this year in late March and early April, and I think this caused the later harvest.

 

The two photographs above are of the Sentinel tree.  You can see the branches weighted down by the fruit.  I  probably should have thinned the fruit earlier in the year, but I did not do it because I did not know how much of the fruit would be shared with with critters.  If we get this big of a harvest next year, I will thin the trees more. 

 

The photographs above and below are of the Redhaven tree.  One of the main branches really bowed under the weight of the fruit.  I also suspect that the weight of a climbing possum caused it to bow even more.

The photograph below really shows how prolific the trees were. 

I tend to harvest the fruit when they give a little to touch.  The Sentinel peaches below had less red blush than the Redhaven. 

 

 

Our fig trees were also very prolific.  We have five fig trees, but only two of them are very mature.  The nursery mislabelled the two mature trees, but as I have mentioned in the past, I think they are Lattarula/Italian Honey figs.  They ripened over a three to four week period in July.  When ripe, they get bright yellow and have an amber interior.  They are very sweet.  Some of them weep a milky liquid when picked, as you can see with a couple of them in the photograph below. 

 

We also had a very large pear crop.  It was a crop of impressive, huge pears.

We have four mature Orient, Warren, Monterrey, and Moonglow trees.  We also have four young Pineapple, Kieffer, Seckle, and Magness trees.

The Warren, Monterrey, and Moonglow all produced only a few  fruit, but the Orient tree was the real star of the summer.  It probably produced about fifty 10-14 ounce fruit, some of which are in the photographs below.

As with planting a lot of different types of fruit, you also benefit from planting several varieties of the same type of fruit.  In addition to helping with pollination, you never know which tree is going to have a good year.  If you increase the number of varieties in your "orchard", you increase your chances of success.