Can anybody recommend any solid, general texts about pears? And I am particularly interested in one key specific: information on the effective home-storage and ripening of keeping varieties.

I was at the Corvallis repository yesterday seeking scion for a rootstock donation I have been promised in a month or so. My focus was late-ripening pears. Late-collected scion grafted in the warmer temperatures of late spring doesn't exactly bode well, does it, but I thought I'd give it a go and try bud-grating. for the first time, a little later in the season, on my failures.

Ran into the affable Dave Morse there. He is leading a group of Master Gardeners doing weekly flowering surveys over the course of the next few weeks. After the pouring rain of the early part of the morning, by the time we got to the trees, the scene was sunsplashed Edenic.

Joe Postman (what a delightful fellow) was full of support and intel. I was somewhat surprised to learn that he has very little contact with other repositories around the world. None with the French, for example. Somehow I had assumed that everyone was chatting with everyone else. Joe tells me that what distinguishes the USDA repository is that a key focus of the collection is genetic diversity, where the rest of the world tends to focus their efforts on maintaining local varieties.

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