FRUITLESS PEARS

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 286, 30 August 1941, Page 14

FRUITLESS PEARS

The Reason And Remedy

Should you have but one pear tree in the garden you have perhaps found in previous years that, though showing plenty of flower in spring, the tree fails to “set” that flower into fruits. If that is your experience, then the likelihood is that you are growing a self-sterile variety which needs to have the flowers pollinated with pollen brought by insects from another variety of pear tree before it can "set” the blossom and mature atrop of fruit, Of course, the permanent' remedy for this unsatisfactory state of affairs ■ is to grow two pear trees in the garden—of different varieties —so that one will “mate” with the other, but if you have not space for another tree, there is a very simple way of still enabling the flowers to be fertilized. What you must do is to look round and see from where, when the time comes for action, you can beg a dozen or so flowering shoots from another variety of pear. Get them when they are about to open their flowers, and place them in a jar of water suspended among your flowering branches. Tire bees and wild insects will do the rest—that is, they will transfer pollen from the flowers from one to the other and so effect the necessary crosspollination for good fruit-setting. c