Over the last few days, I'm estimating that I have knocked in excess of 2,000 pears off of my trees to keep limbs from breaking. I was too late on some of them. Last year was also a limb breaking nightmare. I can't explain what has changed to cause this. I don't remember limb breaking being such a problem before last year.
One thing I have learned is that European Pear varieties are the worst for breaking limbs. My Asian pears are also loaded, but I haven't had a single limb to break on any of them.
Another observation that you might be interested in - when I walk back to the trees in a few days after unloading the green pears, every single one of them will be gone.
PS - I have had some FB this year too. The European varieties seem worse for that too - except for Ayers and Moonglow. I also noticed that on one of my Olympic Giants that I have some leaves yellowing near the top of the tree - kind of reminds me of scab on apple leaves. However, it is loaded with big pears and the few yellowing leaves don't seem to be causing any problems.
The pic below taken about 13 days ago is an example of the sagging limbs. I got to this tree in time. Some others were not so lucky.
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