Pear tree - when are you gonna bear fruit?

[cheops]

Hi All,
Is there anything I can do to start my pear tree producing blossom and then some fruit. I have a small garden so space is valuable and I am getting very frustrated my pear tree has yet to blossom. I am seriously thinking of giving up on the tree and digging it out this spring if once again no blossom. Any ideas and advice will be greatly appreciated and to help those in the know I will now give you as much information about this tree as I can. It is a Conference pear, planted in the ground three years ago. Planted in a sunny spot. It has grew well and each of the last couple of years I have lightly pruned it so the sunlight and air can reach the centre of the tree. The tree is about 8 feet high, well branced and the main trunk is sturdy. It is growing in the Croydon area and a Conference pear is growing in each of the two adjacent neighbours' gardens and they are fruiting each year. . I don't think it is growing rapidly and therefore not interested in fruiting - I say this because the growth of the tree each near is not excessive. Do pear trees takes 5 or more years before they fruit so all this is normal? Can you be unlucky and have a tree that will possibly never fruit? Would your advice be to get rid of it or bew more patient? Please help. Thanks.

[shobhna]

I too would be interested in an answer because I have a pear tree, been in the ground for maybe 5 years. It did have 4 small pears one year and were very tasty but it has not fruited since, I do however, have blossom on it, just no fruit.

[FB.]

My advice would be to be patient - and unless there are obvious signs of wilting or starvation - don't feed, water or otherwise do anything to make it happy; a slightly stressed tree produces the best and most fruit. However, it will take a season or two for the less-favourable conditions to persuade it to start fruiting - nutrients can remain in the soil for a couple of years after feeding.
A prune of the new growth in July can also encourage fruit bud formation for the following year.

Or ask your neighbours how they are managing their trees to get them to fruit.

Pears often take longer to reach the fruiting age than apples - the old phrase used to be "plant an apple tree for your retirement and a pear tree for your heirs".

With modern dwarfing rootstocks (or with vigorous rootstocks in infertile/shallow soil), fruiting happens earlier.

However, if the soil is too good - especially if the soil is moist but not flooded - the tree may not fruit for several years. A bit of drought stress from letting the soil dry, avoid much nitrogen feed, but give an extra helping of a potassium-feed might help reduce growth and boost flowering.

Are you certain that it is the correct variety - and is it on the dwarfing/precocious quince rootstock, rather than Pyrus or seedling rootstock (which may well take a decade or more to start cropping)?

[solway cropper]

I bought a 'concorde' pear tree from a reputable nursery three years ago and it has stormed away. Plenty of blossom last year but most of it got blasted off in a storm but I did get half a dozen pears. Other than putting a good dollop of muck and some bone meal in the planting hole I've done nothing to it. I'm sure FB is right that a pampered tree is less likely to fruit.

[FB.]

solway

Yes, you're in an area of plentiful rainfall and the soil won't dry as easily as the hotter/sunnier/lower-rainfall SouthEast and EastAnglia.

Plus you put lots of good stuff into the planting hole.

Water and nitrogen and off it goes.

.

Here in the East, near Cambridge, the warm, dry conditions - including lack of rainfall - really slows their growth down and induces early cropping; it's so hot, dry, shallow and infertile soil here that even figs don't need root restriction of "fig pits" to crop young and heavily.
This may sound great to have slow growth and early flowering, but due to the dry soil it's actually quite difficult to keep dwarfs or even medium vigour rootstocks (MM106, Quince A, St.Julien A) alive unless planted in moist shady ground.

[cheops]

Interesting to hear a slightly stressed tree produces the best and most fruit. I would have naturally thought the opposite. Maybe this is the reason or one of the reasons it's not fruiting for though I've never fed it apart from the original planting time, I've watered it frequently [almost every day in dry weather along with the more shallow rooted vegetables and flowers.] As for asking my neighbours how they get their trees to fruit there is no point really as they are neglected older established trees that just fruit themselves. As for the tree being the correct variety - yes I'm sure it is a Conference but alas I don't know the rootstock. The tree was bought in Lidl's. Each year black patches cover many of the leaves by the end of summer [not sure what this is but surely it can't be the reason for no blossom or fruit, and the older neighbours' trees which fruit have these black patches also.
Thanks FB and Solway for your interest, comments and advice. I think I will give the tree another couple of springs to blossom with unwatered summers. Fingers crossed.

[rustylady]

Watering anything every day encourages roots to stay near the soil surface. A good soak once a week would be better for your veg and flowers.

[cheops]

Hi rustylady, I appreciate what you are saying but here we can have no rainfall for weeks and weeks. I remember last summer a very dry period and I watered the vegetables more or less daily then we did have heavy rain and I remember thinking that will soak the ground well. But the next day when I pulled up some large spring onions I couldn't believe how a few inches down the ground was dry despite that heavy rain and my previous watering.

[FB.]

Stop watering the tree. In fact, if you're watering almost daily I am amazed that it isn't suffering from root rots and canker; it's probably the slight canker/rot resistance of being on a Quince A rootstock which has helped avoid its roots being affected.

A well-establised tree is a clever thing - when rain falls, its roots (if the rootstock is vigorous enough) quickly grow into the wet soil and expand like balloons (the roots will look like a short piece of spaghetti on the end of a cotton thread (i.e. like a water-filled balloon on the end of a pipe). The tree then draws water from these thousands of little "living reservoirs" for the next several weeks and - along with water deep down in the soil (or a water table) - that is how trees can go for months without much rain in summer.

The black on the leaves is probably scab - a fungal disease caused by too much rainfall - so you tree is clearly getting more water than it really needs if you are also watering it. The scab may also be a sign of too many trees of the same type growing in one area (neighbours gardens) and now a localised disease population is building up and being passed from one tree to another because the trees are basically all the same tree ("clones").
Once the diseases have found a way to attack one Conference pear in a locality it isn't long before it spreads to all the other Conference pears nearby - but, had the nearby pears been a different variety they would not be so easy for the Conference-specialised diseases to attack.

[FB.]

Watering anything every day encourages roots to stay near the soil surface. A good soak once a week would be better for your veg and flowers.

I agree. Open-ground-plants seem to perform better if they get once-per-week (ish) watering rather than daily. Occasional heavy watering is much closer to the effect of natural rainfall and plants seem to prefer it.
Potted plants may need daily watering as they are unable to spread their roots far and wide.

[donnakebab]

I planted some fruit trees on my lottie in the autumn of 2010. The only one that blossomed was the Conference pear but I was told to take the blossom off and give the tree it's first year to establish roots, which is what I did. I did water it when dry by no means every day and so far this year I have watered the trees twice, we have had very little rainfall this year.

Having read the above I think I will stop watering but the other thing I want to know is if the pear tree is in blossom today when I go to lottie (I suspect it will be), should I protect it from the frost that has been forecast for tonight?

[Peas'n'Kews]

Some pear trees need another pear tree, or a quince, nearby to fertilize its little blossoms. So if you do get blossom but don't get fruit, that could be why.... Which ones need another tree for fertilization depends on species.

[Madasafish]

Conference is self fertile if I recall correctly.

We planted our pear tree , mulched round it in spring and ignored it. Took three years to fruit. Ditto our Victoria plum but 4 years..

If you intend to water trees, build a small dam round it and flood it.

Other wise anything less than 40 litres is going to have little effect. Pear roots can go a long way.

[ukfapower]

5 years ago this autumn we put a Conference in and also another pear called Beth. This spring the Conference is 6 ft tall at most so the original poster (OP) is winning there. I think it started fruiting after three years so I reckon the OPs tree will produce fruit soon.

The Beth was very slow to fruit and we were giving up. But then last year she produced about 7 tasty fruits. The Beth is espaliered ... well sort of espaliered to the best of my limited ability :^) Dunno if this slows down the start of fruit production? Hopefully now she's started, she'll carry on.

I try to give all the fruit trees a good drink every week during a warm, dry spell.

[FB.]

ukfapower

Maybe your soil isn't very good.
In poor soil, plants will not grow much and will try to fruit earlier in life - although often they haven't managed to get strong enough roots down to support the normal development of the crop.

Quince rootstocks are used for most pears, but quince does not tolerate the poor dry soils often found in the East of the UK.
I now use Pyrus, Pyrodwarf (not as dwarf as the name suggests) and seedling.
They crop early in life due to the poor soil being so stressful to them and with plants tending to fruit when stressed (reproduce when they're stressed; grow when they're contented).

Nowadays, due to very poor soil, I use really strong rootstocks to compensate.
The soil is so ridiculously bad that I even have a pear on the massive Pyrus rootstock (normally considered to reach 20ft+), growing as a 5ft tall upright cordon.