Picking pears

[Lyingonthesofainthedark]

Can anyone out there tell me whether my pears will be edible?

I have had to pick most of my Comice pears, because the tree is young, and it cropped really heavily. Two branches have snapped, there were so many on it.

Some are too small and some do seem to be a decent size. I picked them in order to save the tree, really.

Should I bin them, or will they ripen? The RHS says October for Comice. Has anyone had this problem, and found the pears edible?

Thanks.

Pears ripen in the fruit bowl rather than on the tree. I think you're not going to get the ones you've picked to ripen as it's too early for the variety. Try leaving the larger ones in a bowl for a few days and see if they soften at all. You could try using them in something like chutney if they don't.

We had an old Conference pear tree at our last house. The only way to get the fruit was to wait for it to fall off. I used to make jam and chutney with it.

Thanks, @wowfudge. I suspect that's right. What a pity, especially as I only had 3 pears last year. Over 150 this year!

Is pear chutney nice, do you know?

Normal way of harvesting pears is to pick as soon as they part easily when you lift them up against the stem. They then ripen in the bowl, and are ready to eat then the neck feels slightly soft. If you wait for them to ripen on the tree, you have about 24 hours before they go over! So there is a fair chance the larger pears will ripen. You may even find some of the smaller ones are cook-able.

Next year, thin the developing fruit so there aren't too many for the branch, and be prepared in extremis to support the branch. Except that next year you probably won't have the problem - it will have exhausted itself this year with the effort of producing all that fruit, and will have a year with a smaller crop. "Biennial bearing" is a problem with both apples and pears, not easy to correct once they've settled in to it.

Delicious. Unfortunately I can't find the recipe I used, I found it on a blog, but I've since looked for a tried and tested recipe online and tweaked the spices to my liking - quite a lot include chilli and the original recipe didn't.

Completely agree - you get a glut one year and hardly anything the next with pears.

I made pear and ginger chutney one year - was fantastic.

Pear chutney is heaven

I expect it will have exhausted itself. I'm going to look for a pear chutney recipe- I like the sound of one with ginger. Perhaps I'll compost the really small ones, chutney the middle sizes and chance leaving the rest to see if they ripen. I definitely regret no thinning them. I've lost 2 out of 5 branches. I've had the tree 3 years, a reasonable sturdy one from a fruit nursery. Funnily enough I did support one branch, but not the others.

Maybe this one:

www.thepropermarmaladecompany.co.uk/products/pear-ginger-chutney-recipe

I definitely regret no thinning them. Being a good gardener is basically down to making a lot of mistakes. There's no better way to learn, and it helps you push boundaries, find out things that work in your conditions but which go against the advice given.

Biggest help to me was when I realised that an awful lot of the traditional advice results from generations of professional gardeners - all seeking to maximise yields on huge plot. The 80/20 rule applies to gardening too, so it seems - you can get 80% of the yield with 20% of the work. (Well, maybe it's more 60/40 - but often you don't need to maximise yield, just get "enough".)

Thank you, everyone.