Our pears are here!
It's just our first year with it, but my gamble on buying an older combo pear tree on sale at the nursery last fall - one that they said was at least 3 years old, unlike most you get in traditional late-winter shopping expeditions - has paid off with ten or twelve pears from three out of five of the varieties.
Flemish Beauty , a Belgian cold-hardy variety, was the first one to ripen and quite good, in a dry citrusy kind of way that some websites describe as 'floral'.
Rescue, a Northwest Washington variety discovered in the 1970s, is not only as local as it gets for us, but by far the sweetest and most melt-in-your-mouth flavor.
Bartlett, one we're all familiar with, only produced a couple of fruits, and was the most vulnerable to pests of the three.
It's a great day when you harvest fruit from a tree. In my first home, I didn't plant an apple tree until the year before we decided to move out to the farm. At the farm, I planted nine trees (cherry, pear and apple), which the current owner is now reaping the literal fruits of. And at our short stint back in the city, I kept the Granny Smith and combo cherry trees I'd bought in the pots...and planted them in the ground when we arrived to the Skagit Valley late last summer. But this combo pear? It's the first one to fully fruit in front of me as a gardener...and I couldn't be more excited!
"A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap." ~ Abraham Lincoln
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