Timber Pear Seeds

Currently unavailable: Selected Hybrid Pear Varieties and Seedlings known for their strong upright straight growth habit. 

If you grow enough of anything, you will eventually see what could be best described as the rest of the story within a genome and what it is capable of.  That is the case of pears. For a while, I began growing a lot of pears from my hybrid orchard as well as seedlings of "Stacey" pear from Maine. At one point, I had too many and removed some of the seedlings. Others I let grow and began thinning the plantings based on growth rate and upright growth habit.  With the 'Stacey' group only one tree really showed strong vigor  where with the open pollinated Ecos pear hybrids, many trees showed incredible hybrid vigor like nothing I have seen before with any fruit tree. 

The desire to grow the pear tree for wood came partially from a pear wood recorder I had since highschool, a Youtube video demonstrating pear woods acoustical properties and a customer who made organ musical cabinets out of it. For the cabinent maker, it was a hard wood to get a hold of. Every now and then he would offer someone cash if they had a large tree in their yard so he could mill it and get enough wood to fulfill a few orders once in a while. Today you do see pear wood electric guitars once in a while and they still make recorders out of them, but for the most part only Pyrus communis is used and it is very difficult to find quality veneer wood because the trees really grow like most fruit trees and are not straight at all with lots of knots and spurs buried deep within the wood. Older trees also tend to hollow over time as well as limb breakage due to fruit production and narrow crotch angles. This is the nature of the pear.

I have selected some of the best hybrids in this package and will be labeled by a number or name. The selections are based on fast growth rate and low incidence of narrow crotch angles as well as straight central leader growth. These combinations also make it easier to prune over time with fewer limbs developing as the tree matures.  The scions will also come with seeds of these selections so you can further improve on this direction as well as create new rootstocks or even fruiting pears for human consumption. The fruits on these selections are rarely above an inch in diameter. Fruit production appears low in most of them. Fruits are consumed often by black squirrels at my farm early in the season prior to ripening for some reason. 

Growing pears from seed:  Seeds can be fall planted like apple seeds and the seeds will then sprout in the spring after dormancy. The seedlings have very good frost resistance.

For cold dormancy: put seeds in refrigeration at 33 to 38 F for 90-120 days. Use a cold moist stratification with lightly damp Canadian peat moss. After the cold period, put at room temperature and seeds will sprout within a few days up to 30 days.