I bought a 3-in one pear about 3 years ago--I think bosc, bartlett, red sensation. It is still a young tree and I am trying to give it a good shape as it grows. I would like to take out the center trunk to open it up to light, and there are a couple other branches that I would remove. The problem is that I have only seen one type of fruit so far, and I don't want to prune away too much of one type without knowing what they are. Should I just let the thing grow 2 or three more years before shaping it, or is there any way you know of to tell the difference between these three varieties without seeing the fruit? (For example, I think one of them has a more papery bark that cracks here and there instead of smooth bark.) I don't know how old the tree is. It was about 4 feet high when I bought it and its trunk is now about 3 inches in diameter.
You should be able to just look at the original main trunk and see where the 3 varieties were bud grafted onto it. They grow the rootstock then graft 3 different kinds of buds onto it at somewhat different heights and pointing in different directions, then the next year cut the top off the rootstock tree forcing the buds to grow out. Only problem with many multi variety trees is that one is often a more vigorous grower than the others and whichever one it is will attempt to dominate the tree and try to form a new leader! So you need to do more training and pruning to keep the tree balanced out, if ones gone wild it might be hard to do at this point.
But that should at least tell you enough to get started, think that for multi-grafted trees you usually want to keep them pruned into a "vase" form with the different kinds kind of seperated, to keep one from taking over!
Good luck!
Dave
Idyllwild
simplepress
jafar
Marsha H
Viron
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