PEAR FRUITING-BRANCH MODELS RELATED TO YIELD CONTROL AND PRUNING

Knowing how to train and prune pear implies understanding how the trees of the various cultivars grow and crop.
The markedly varying growth and fruiting habits are here related to five models based on trials involving 22 cultivars whose trees were at the onset of cropping (year 3-4), the onset of full fruiting (year 5-7) and adult (year 8 and over). These five fruiting models – ‘Williams’, ‘Doyenné du Comice’ and ‘Abbé Fétel’, ‘Conference’, ‘Beurré Bosc’ and ‘Passe Crassane’ – mainly differ as to the cropping ratio of one-year fruiting shoots to fruiting spurs on 2-3 year or older branches.
This relationship has in turn a marked impact on pruning techniques, which are designed to promote strong regrowth, especially for one-year-old wood, and a modulated severity thereafter, i.e. heading and removing about 50% of the bud load on 2-3-year-old limbs in cv.
Doyenné du Comice and Abbé Fétel.
Removal of the apical shoot and part of the brnche above a suitable fruiting lateral, including the removal of at least one-third of the fruit buds in ‘Passe Crassane’ consistently increases fruit set, usually regardless of pruning as in ‘Beurré Bosc’ and ‘Williams’.

VIII International Symposium on Pear

S. Sansavini

pears, fruit bud and shoot distribution, spur, brindles, pruning

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2002.596.108