pear dilemma

[peanut]

peanut, next year , if you get fruit you can paint the most accessible pear/pears, the first ones that the squirrel will go for in a mx of olive oil and paprika and he will start to think they all taste bad and leave them alone, i have done this with other fruit and it works..

Oh my goodness, that is fantastic!
I shall put a note in my calendar to do this, thank you Buffs.

[ameno]

the OH has made over 20 jars of pear and ginger jam, frozen about 6k of them and left a big tub by the gate for anyone to help themselves, but we still have a bucketful and the out of reach ones are still on the two trees, about another 10k I think, i wonder if we will get this amount each year? i hope not or i will be living on jam sandwiches for life....the branches from 10ft up have been touching the ground as the pears have been big, a neighbour asked what was wrong with my trees and laughed when i showed him they were just full of fruit, on ground that i was told would never be good for growing as it was a small carpark for the village hospital (our house) in the 30sto the 50s..

A lot of fruit trees can be prone to biennial bearing, where you get a huge crop one year then few to none the next, as it has a rest and recovers from the previous year. So you may find you get very few next year, but then a huge crop again the year after.
The way to break this habit is to thin the fruit heavily next time it gets a bumper year. That way the tree won't be taxed so much during that year, so should still give a decent crop the next year, and that will mean it won't have built up so much energy for the year after (as it won't have had an off year), so the year after that should give a normal crop rather than a huge one.

[BUFFS]

we have biennial fruiting on our victoria plum but as we get very changeable summers i dont thin out the fruit on the good year as some years the summer doesn't really appear, the rain just gets warmer, so we take what we can get, need a 20ft ladder for the topmost fruit on the two trees..

[BUFFS]

it has stopped raining pears now, i think they are al down so just thinking about festooning the lower to mid branches and removing the big leader that carries the out of reach fruit, it will have to stop raining first..