If you send me a stamped envelope I can send you a couple of varieties that will actually do well in your climate. Pears aren't the easiest fruit to get up the sugar up north so you need to grow the right ones. Bartlett will be reliable where you are. You might as well grow Seckel instead of Warren because it's a better setter of fruit of similar flavor- fruit-set can also be a problem with pears. Aurora is good and Sheldon can be fantastic for a lover of Comice. Comice is a more southern variety and I don't like northeast Anjous either- they don't get enough sugar here. I highly recommend Harrow Sweet but I have no wood to offer this year. I do have Harrow Delight which is a very productive Bartlett type, but bears in early-mid Aug when I'm not much interested in pears. I don't have time to run to the post office so tell me how much weight I can put into a stamped addressed envelope and I'll give you a sampler.

I wish i had found this forum sooner. You guys are a great source of info. I live in central Pennsylvania, and we have had an unusually warm March. Last i heard, we are at 12 days so far this month above 70 degrees. The apple trees are already in the green tip stage. I do not have any more scion wood that is still dormant, so i guess i will have to wait till next year to gather more scion. Can i make my own rootstock from the suckers on my mom's tree? This is a quote i read on another web site. "The rootstock is actually a sucker that sprouted from a host tree, and sawdust is mounded up against it which causes the young trunk to sprout roots." I know there are suckers at the base of her tree- will the suckers be dwarf? And then i can bench graft next year.

Out here in the northeast all the commercial growers know that a dry summer makes great tasting fruit but they probably prefer the bigger fruit that tends to come with regular rain and lots of warm sun in between. Those big fruit really fill a bushel basket in a hurry. Season before this one I let the weeds grow under my peaches hoping they'd suck up surplus water but there was so much wet cool weather the weeds made no difference. The peaches sucked until late summer when it finally dried out a bit and we had almost summer weather. This summer was very dry but as was mentioned before some of us here (myself included) suffered from a too hard frost at least a week past petal fall for peaches. Made the harvest spotty for stone fruit. Next season I'm going to try some root pruning and maybe woven landscape fabric to shed water as an attempt to make certain peaches less vegetative and higher in sugar. Plums don't seem as vulnerable to these issues and nectarines are much less vigorous than peaches- at least the ones I'm growing here. I may not be going for what fruitnut considers optimum fruit, however. I don't even want to have his high standards- I'm already spoiled enough. Yes, pome fruit grows determinately, getting most growth with the spring surge while stone fruit is indeterminate and grows throughout the growing season. Insects have an affect on this as leaf hoppers and aphids can arrest growth and tend to on Euro plums and pomes. Unfortunately this arrest of veg growth is probably not helpful to fruit quality because they are sucking the carbs like an open spigot, mining for protean.

Apparently the link that I gave earlier to the 2011 paper has stopped working. Try this link: doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2010.06.029 Here is the abstract. Title: Effect of cultural system and storage temperature on antioxidant capacity and phenolic compounds in strawberries Authors: Peng Jin a,b, Shiow Y. Wang c, Chien Y. Wanga,*, Yonghua Zheng b Authors affiliation: a Food Quality Laboratory, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA b College of Food Science and Technology, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, PR China c Genetic Improvement of Fruits and Vegetables Laboratory, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA Published in: Food Chemistry 124 (2011) 262270 Abstract: "The effects of cultural systems and storage temperatures on antioxidant enzyme activities and nonenzyme antioxidant components in two cultivars (Earliglow and Allstar) of strawberries were investigated. Fruit samples were hand-harvested from organic and conventional farms in Maryland, USA, and were stored at 10, 5 and 0 C. The results from this study showed that strawberries grown from organic culture exhibited generally higher activities in antioxidant enzymes. Moreover, the organic culture also produced fruits with higher level of antioxidant contents. Strawberries stored at higher temperature (10 C) had higher activities of antioxidant enzymes and antioxidant capacities than those stored at lower temperatures (0 or 5 C), in both organic and conventional cultural systems. In conclusion, strawberries produced from organic culture contained significantly higher antioxidant capacities and flavonoid contents than those produced from conventional culture, and even though low storage temperatures retarded decay, they also reduced the increase in antioxidant activities." --------------------------------------------- I found the following idea of a "compost sock" interesting (wouldn't this be considered an organic method?). This link is to a 2009 USDA reviewed research paper that compared growing straberries in "compost socks" with a standard black plastic mulch system and also in a standard matted row system. Please compare the results. The definition of what a "compost sock" is was given as: Compost Socks. Mature, leaf-yard-trimming compost (Leafgro, Millersville, MD) was used to fill 20-cm-diameter compost socks (Filtrexx Inc., Grafton,OH) using a pneumatic blower system attached to a flexible hose. Leaf-grass-poultry (layer) manure compost produced at the USDA Composting Facility, Beltsville, MD, and polyethylene-mesh socks were also used.Adrip irrigation system (BerryHill Irrigation, Buffalo Junction, VA) with emitters spaced 30.5 cm apart and an emitter flow rate of 0.055 L-min per linearm(4.5 gal-min per 1000 linear ft) of row was placed on bed centers (on top of compost socks) and secured with metal landscape pins."