This is my father's pear tree out in the country. It is loaded this year. Many of the limbs will break off. It is too tall to prune or even pick the pears. The squirrels will cut them all down eventually. Next year it might not have any. The pears are very small when there are this many, and they aren't very good anyway. My mother loved to give them to the goats as treats. I'm not sure Rusty (our last goat) will even eat them. He is very picky and suspicious of everything. The tree sits in the middle of a circle in the driveway. The hummingbirds use it as a stopping off place to get to the feeders on the porch. The tree is coming down this year. I meant to do it last winter. I don't feel bad. My father cut down the little cedar tree my mother and I decorated every year for Christmas, because he didn't like to mow around it. None of us was overly sentimental about trees, anyway.
Wow ! That pear tree is definitely full of pears, @Nancy Hart , and you should have plenty of them to eat this fall. Pears are on of my most favorite fruits, but they have to be just perfectly ripe to enjoy them. Too green and they are hard and bitter, and too ripe and they are mushy. Maybe this winter , when everything is dormant, you can give it a really good pruning, so it is not so tall and takes up so much room, and then you could reach the pears better next year ? We had a spring frost here in northern Alabama that got some of the fruit trees. Our friend who has fig trees in his orchard, said that all of the figs were frozen, but his pears made it through the frost just fine, so he should have pears, too. Our fruit trees are all just little ones that we have planted, and we have one little peach on the peach tree and nothing else. Just tell Rusty that he is .....under NO circumstances.......to eat any of the pears from that tree, and he will probably expend every effort to get to the pear tree and gobble every last pear until he looks ready to pop.
We planted an oak and a maple tree a few years ago on our Oklahoma property. Most of our working lives was spent in Lubbock, Texas, 3000-3100 feet above sea level. That is a flat area on the south plains with no trees except those planted by people who moved into the area. It is adjectant to eastern New Mexico which is the northern reaches of the Chihuauan Desert. Lubbock and the sourranding area is a semi-arid region, an area where it is almost sinful to cut down trees in that part of rthe world. Trees block the constant wind, the sandstorms, provide privacy in an area where none exist. Here in Oklahoma there are blenty of trees but we wanted our own. I'll think good thoughts for your pear tree between now and the time you whack her down.
Ok. You guys are making me feel guilty, so we will take a brief time out to play some music, in honor of trees. This is one of my favorite songs, by the way.
Just take a look at some of magnificent trees. I suppose when you have trees you grow accustom to them, often passing them unseeing. But when they are totally absent you grow an appreciation. I was in a camera club in Lubbock. Not much in the way of landscape to shoot in that part of the world. We made trips to the New Mexico rockies to shoot trees and adobe homes. Precious memories.
Love the video, @Nancy Hart . That looks like an old fashioned pear tree. As I recall, they are not that tasty to eat but they make the very best pear preserves. They need to be really, really ripe to eat fresh. They will still be kinda hard but the flavor is sweeter. I see a deer in the second picture. I bet he likes the pears.
The squirrels cut the pears down, take a few bites out of each one, then move on. Then the deer move in for the rest. You have to be very fast to get them, if they aren't bruised already from the fall. Ha! Yes, the picture was of the deer, originally, not the tree.
@Yvonne Smith, usually the frost gets this one. I do think the pears have to be just at the right stage of ripening to be good and soften up. Usually too green when the squirrels cut them down, and they don't ripen well. It didn't take long for this one to start producing as I recall. It's about 20 years old now. Exactly! You know goats well. I remember you said once you had goats.
@Nancy Hart Without viewing "Trees", I can recite every word of a song my Mother sang to me 70 years ago! "I think that I shall never see......." Is that it? Frank
That's it @Frank Sanoica. I first heard that poem from my father, when I was a little kid. For years I thought it was like this: I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as, "A Tree." Maybe referring to the other poem he always recited about the Chestnut tree. Ha! "Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands" .... Punctuation makes all the difference, but I didn't know about punctuation then either. I better quit now. I'm really not making any sense. Btw, Paul Robeson had a great voice. Worth listening to.
We had a cherry tree when I was a kid but, usually, by the time the cherries were ripe, either the birds would get to them or the web worms would destroy the whole crop.
@Ken Anderson In Michigan? Great cherry tree climate, peaches and apples as well. After I got married, we picked wonderful grapes near St. Joe/Benton Harbor; I've been making wine for an awful long time now......I was in my 20s then..... Frank
I can only think of, at most, two years in which we were able to get cherries from that tree, although it produced a lot.