Hi Drew- Talked to the extension people this week and learned: 1. There was one sample brought in, not several. But, there were several people describing the same symptom to the horticulturist anecdotally. There is a lot of room for error here, so after I learned that I assumed that there should be a large fudge factor built in. 2. The sample that did come in was sent to the Plant Pathology Clinic at MSU in Bozeman and they simply said it wasn't sick, but they didn't know why it was so small. We did have a nasty hot spell during the summer. I think it hit 105 F several -a few?- days in a row, and a lot of things were showing stress. My apples did fine, but we were overwatering, if anything. (My youngish pear didn't fruit last year.) So it's easy for me to imagine that it was related to that, and the idea of insufficient calcium, or somethin' sounds plausible to me, but I'm ignorant in the matter. Have I ever seen this before? Well, I only got into pears a few years ago, but I do think I've seen large pear trees, overloaded with tiny fruit, and wondering why it all was so small. Once again, it's easy for me to imagine that if you take a large tree, fail to prune it, let it overcrop and then subject it to extremes of temperature that you'll get undersized fruit. But if that happens to my pampered baby I'll be a little less relaxed about it! Best, M

Ooh, that may be hard to figure out where the separate grafts are right now. See if you can find four different kinds of leaves, right now. If you can differentiate the leaves, then you'll find your different grafts. If that fails, well... just trim it back well, then wait until it fruits and see. Not all of the grafts may have survived, and perhaps the rootstock has sent out some shoots, too. (That fruit probably would not be very edible.) Let me know how it goes! Good luck.

I've had this tree for 2 years now. It is located outdoors in a full sun spot with good soil that I amended with compost when I was planting it. Since then, other than watering, I haven't really fertilized it. It has a good amount of green growth on it since planted it, but since the one time that it tried to set fruit, it hasn't really blossomed. I guess lack of fertilizing and the fact that its still relatively young might be the reason for no fruiting. I will try fertilizing it, putting it on a regular watering schedule, I hope to see some fruits of my labor!! :) Thanks for all the responses!

You might want to look at this article http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/gagarden/msg041309538748.html A callery pear for example could be top grafted over to another variety of large pear which is what I would do. It is undesirable for them to make fruit aka produce seed because they are known to be invasive. They are very useful as a root stock in my location. Callery pears will pollinate many varieties of pears but I'm not sure if it will pollinate your neighbors. If It does act as a pollinator remember the neighbors tree only will get the larger fruit. Callery pear tree fruit will always be small . The next generation of callery seeds might make larger fruited unique varieties when the trees were grown from seed as shown in the picture above. Those trees in the above picture were not intentionally grown but rather grew by accident on a farm in my area. Some day work may be done to use callery to breed better pears. In the late 1800's the kieffer pear was grown from a cross between the sand pear and European pear so natural crosses do happen across species. Garber is another sand pear hybrid highly resistant to fire blight. Hybrid pears are fascinating because of their disease resistance. This post was edited by ClarkinKS on Fri, Jan 2, 15 at 0:07