Pears and Rootstock Trials: Summer Field Notes

ohxf87 pear rootstock, you can propagate from softwood. in fact it doesn't stool very well, pear doesn't have the same adventitious buds along the root crown like apple. what this means is, if you chop these off and expect shoots you can hill up like the way an apple stoolbed works, well it doesn't. but the softwood can root so it has some promise, pear roostocks have been in short supply at our nursery, growing out ussurian seedlings can be challenging, and slow. stooling so far no luck, and really all of the clonal stocks in Canada are both expensive, hard to source, and not cold hardy. ohxf87 can work if the graft is low, so we're going to try it. maybe some cotoneaster as well.

ohxf 87 softwood rooted heavily after a few weeks. pear rootstocks have been a bottleneck, so hoping this gives me some more supply. In Canada we just don't have access to bulk rootstocks like in the US, they're at least 6-8 ea and limited to mostly less cold hardy options. as a small nursery the only realistic option is to propagate your own, and for zone 2-3 we often use seedlings. pear seedlings are a bit tricky to grow, I'm getting better at it and found a better supply of the seeds but it still takes 2 years to get them up to size to graft, so far. clonal pear stocks are less cold hardy but much easier if I can get a stoolbed going.

ussurian pear on saskatoon gets this attractive red foliage by mid summer.

intergeneric grafts on saskatoon, first one is hawthorn, which is producing lots of growth with crazy 3" thorns, second is double worked pears, an interstem of a fast growing variety topped with favoritka red, a hard to find russian pear. if you make it to the last one it's a 3 minute walk through of this block of grafts in a partly shaded forest area #grafting

favoritka pear, on saskatoon 3 year old graft first year flowering. determined to get to try these russian pears this year, maybe I should do a japanese style protective bag over it.

new pear grafts, about three weeks for them to leaf out, this is when I start to check for rootstock shoot extension and keep it managed, these are top worked saskatoon trees so it's good to leave some lower growth to keep the tree healthy

walk around my experimental pear orchard, grafted onto saskatoon. five min video. maybe I should be shooting for youtube, really this is mostly for my own video documentation, or if you’ve thought about growing pears on saskatoon rootstock this give you an idea of what 1-3 year old grafts can look like. site conditions will change the results, this is on established trees at shoulder height to stay above the browse line, also dense with some shade. hoping to start getting fruit next year, and I expect most will need staking.

large pear and apple trees top worked last year into multiple cultivars mostly as a store for scion wood. #grafting

topping up sawdust in this ussurian pear stoolbed. It’s just getting established. #stoolbed

on old harbin pear tree top worked to produce scion wood. Working over old trees like this can take one scion and multiply it for the next grafting season. This spring I used many of the scions to graft new pears, and also to graft onto saskatoon. #propagation