I have had some pretty good luck with growing trees from seed: Sawtooth from Montgomery, Chestnuts from Tennessee, Persimmon from Lawley, and Pears from Georgia. A good percentage of the trees lived and are producing fruit today. The only problem was the Pears were not true to the mother tree. Each pear tree began producing tiny, hard, bitter "ornamental" pears. So I contacted one of the deerhunterforum.com Grafting expects for some step by step advice. Native Hunter walked me through the process, and here is a picture of the best result so far. In subsequent posts I will show pictures of my experience. We went from this tree, grown from seed and planted about 2015. This picture is March, 2021 To this (picture is October, 2021
So we started with several trees that were so very healthy but only producing a thousand little ornamental fruit. Now what I wanted. With Native's instructions I tried to perform some bark grafting. It was disheartening to chop off the major portion of these healthy trees but the process began. Actually, it began a little earlier. I have a neighbor at the farm who has some great pear trees. Early March he and I cut some small limbs from his trees. I placed wet paper towels around them, put in plastic bag and in the frig. A few days later my grandson and I tried out hand at "bark grafting". The plan is to cut the tree about chest high, cut about three slivers, sharpen a six to eight inch stick from the scions, slide them into the slivers and tape. Native instructed to run tape backwards on the first time around so it will come off easier down the road. So here we are: Just for funsies I put a few of the scions in some potting soil to see what they would do. Native said it was a difficult method. Even though they sprouted he was right. They died in the pot. I was a little worried when my pot scions sprouted but the ones on the pear graft showed no new growth. I checked the limbs and they were still green and nimble, so we just waited. Finally, small leaves began to appear. There was hope
We had a good spring and summer of rain so I am sure that helped the process. But not all grafts made it. We grafted maybe 9 trees. Five were successful at first and now I have four good ones, and they look very healthy. More leaves began to appear I was excited to send pictures to Native, and he was steady to let me know the next steps. To protect the new limbs from wind and elements Native suggested a cradle made of bamboo. And so we are here with a few HEALTHY trees and some HOPE And this picture shows how large the limbs have become from those small scions. THANKS NATIVE!!
Looking great Lak. It looks like the student has now become the teacher! Hope to see you enjoying pears before too many years.
Those look really good. I hope to do the same thing in a few years. I bought several Dr. Deer and Thanksgiving pears from Chestnut Hills at Walmart when they were on closeout a couple of years ago so I should have plenty of scions available. I realize that you will not get an exact copy of the parent tree, but what was your seed source? I collected about 50 seeds in August from a neighbor's pear tree to use as rootstock. I realize this probably isn't the easiest or fastest way to get trees, but I like a challenge.
On the old forum a guy from Menlo, Ga sent me the first pear seed. Some others I got from a neighbor's tree. My seedlings and subsequent trees did great, just not the fruit that I wanted. GOOD luck with it
UPDATE on the grafted Pear Trees: Three of the pear trees are doing great. Good healthy growth. I have really been pleased with them and again appreciate Native's help with the process. Now if I could just see these trees loaded like his pictures.... And here is the sunrise these trees see some mornings
Update on those trees. We may have produce next year And one cute parting shot. These were hanging out near the golf course in area of my wife's house at Grand National
Trees are looking good! I did the same with some nasty Callery pears in the pasture. Feels good to make something useful out of an invasive, and it's free! The other positive is the quick growth. Amazing how fast they go when pushed by a huge root system. Tried it with some name brand crabapples grafted on 3 year old seedling dolgo's this spring. 2 out of 3 took, so I was happy with that.
