[MAK]

Facinating - I thik that you know your pears! I love to eat them and always slip away to the "Pear and apple man" at our big monthly market. I am not very good with names but the best one I had last autumn was large and very round with deep flesh, pink to aubergine skin colour and quite scenty.
Anyway - I would love to grow more of them as a hobby but we are still plodding thru the Pear Jam we made 3 years ago.

[deepinthewoods]

"Ok but what the heck are you going to do with half an acre of fruit trees?"

Mak, if one grows full standards, they can be used as wind breaks, timber and firewood. I would plant them around the edge of a field and use the field for other purposes. ps. newly cut pear wood, plunged in water turns black and can be used as an ebony substitute. Because it is so hard, wheelwrights used it for pins/dowling. roofers/tilers also used it instead of nails 

really.   thank you. (again)

[RUSTYME]

Cheers Denm , but i am in west wales , no transport , and fife is a bit far to walk . Thanks anyway .
 At the moment , i am completely broke anyway
, i have stepped off the money go round , off the system . This is fine most of the time , but gets a bit difficult when you want to do something like this .
The wi fi thing would probably be good but there are problems .
Firstly , the website describing how to make the antenna out of a pringles tube won't load on my mobile phone , just locks the phone , memory full !
The other problem , i don't eat pringles ! lol .
 I already have trees and hedges around my fields , but have each side of the river is available , as is one side of the track . In all about 700-800 yards . However , the horses will eat anything they can fit in their mouths .
So i will have to section off 1/4 - 1/2 an acre at first and plant larger pot grown trees next to the river and track .
Fitting things in is a nightmare regarding season , horses , weather , my physical ability and last but by no means least , money .
I will get there though , mind you , it might be daisies i am pushing up from below instead .
Will go and read the other threads and if it loads , your blog . Thanks again , thanks Dan and Fib too for the links , they loaded ok .

[denmylne]

mak
for large amounts of pears................juice them and turn them into Perry, pear cider. Napoleon's favourite drink

Rusty
PM me mate, and I'll post you you down the tops of the pyrus communis rootstock I have here. If you stick them in the ground, next year the will have formed roots and you can then graft onto them any type of pear you want. I would suggest looking around your local environment and select cuttings from the best pears which grow near you, I can also send you scion material next year if you want.
Gerard, 1587, "growing fruit trees costs nothing"
pears are a form of Rosaceae, ie a rose, and as such wild pears are covered in long thorns for about the first 15 years of life.It helps keep the animals off, grafting is a form of cloning so determining the age of any fruit tree is  fraught with problems. eg all bramley apples are scions of of one tree in an old ladies garden in england, so technically, if you have a bramley apple tree in your garden, it is already 150 years only, even if you only planted it 2 weeks ago. (this is why the fruit trees you buy in aldis etc, dont have thorns. I have mentioned before on these blogs, that the most important part of any fruit tree is the rootstock, the sooner you get the rootstock growing, the better chance your grafts have of taking.
Another idea is to  try encourage a small side shoot from near the base of any fruit tree you have, prefereably below the graft, and cut a small piece of twig from the ends of one of the main branches and graft it onto this small side shoot. Allow the branch to thicken over time but keep it small. If the main tree starts to canker or is damaged or becomes sick, cut it down, and you will already have a replacement.

by the way, you can graft pears on to hawthorn, whitethorn, quince, whitebeam (check and see if you have any of these already growing along the edges of your fields) and I have also read that you can graft onto apple trees, but cannot as yet confirm this.....yet