Frank, hi. I don't know at this juncture how much of the european pear story applies to the Asians. My sense is that Asians, given the right variety of course (and there are some, I believe, noted as keepers) may be a good deal less fussy than the europeans.

I am very new to this but my sense is that asian pears may be non-climacteric fruit, unlike apples or pears. And if they are indeed climacteric, I sense they will be easier characters to handle.

http://www.quisqualis.com/Clim.....teric.html

Nevertheless, the same basic home-based storage procedures will apply. Here is an excellent summary:

http://extension.oregonstate.e...../fs/fs147/

Thanks for the suggestion, plumfun. I have been reading about how old timers would open up their storage houses in the night in the run up to putting fruit in them, shutting them up during the day, leaving them open during major cold snaps and suchlike, so you are right on the ball with that low tech approach, updated for Springfield white trailer trash (moi) in the new millenium!

As per your sly remark <grin> about holding pears over to July, did I say ‘July’? If so, I mighta been a tad optimistic on that one! (smile) Then again, ‘Pears of New York’ tells me that one of the varieties I’m currently carrying, ‘White Star’, has “fruit as of the size of Bartlett, keeping until May and June, and good for dessert.” But I’m a mite suspicious of that entry, not least because the superlongkeeping pears seem largely suited for culinary rather than dessert use. Pound, I sense will go long, and a couple of others have descriptions which suggest they have been carried into mid-to-late spring in the past. But this all presumes good fruit, harvested correctly and stored well. And that's a rich story many years in the learning. Certainly, the commercial growers can go that long without too much ado, taking Winter Nelis 7-8 months in cold storage and 8-10 months in Controlled Atmospheres. But I haven’t yet discovered a motherlode of ‘lost’ pear varieties that will easily carry as long as the rich variety of long-keeping apples we have access to – but who knows, there may be one or two surprises in store.

Frankly though, I’ll be surprised if I can carry any of my pears through December. Fundamentally, my storage setup appears too primitive. Interestingly, I have a sense that the primary snafu for me just now is not my inability to keep temperatures low but, rather, my ability to isolate various varieties from one another. This is a significant discovery for me. Here’s my quickie take on the wherefores.

One of my major booklearning realizations in recent weeks has been the claim, in several texts, that postharvest chilling is not actually necessary in order to ripen winter pears successfully. The chilling requirement had been the great challenge, as I had perceived it, in ripening many cultivars of long-storing pears, because the contemporary literature I’m encountering insists, for the most part, that refrigeration and/or temperatures well below what my storage abilities are capable of, are necessary to carry winter pears to edibility. Perhaps this emphasis has much to do with the fact that most of the literature focuses on the concerns of commercial growers.

Here’s OSU's David Sugar, for example: “Postharvest chilling induces the capacity to ripen in winter pears, and it promotes uniform ripening throughout the flesh of individual fruit as well as synchronizes ripening among fruit in a lot. The amount of postharvest chilling required differs among winter pear cultivars and is influenced by fruit maturity. Bosc pears may ripen to a buttery texture at room temperature without exposure to cold…Bosc harvested in the early half of the maturity range may need 2 to 4 weeks of postharvest chill for proper ripening. Anjou pears may need from 60 days of chilling when harvested early to 30 days when harvested late in the maturity range. Comice pears typically require 30 days of chilling.”

And the further I looked, the more that chilling appeared to be an absolutely essential requirement for the long-term storage of most cultivars. Here’s David, again: “Proper management of fruit maturity is probably the single most important factor affecting the storage quality of winter pears…Fruit harvested early in the maturity range have the greatest potential to maintain good quality in the long-term storage. The later fruit are harvested, the faster quality deteriorates during storage and the greater the fruit susceptibility to fungal decay during storage.” Put another way, the earlier we harvest, the better the storageability, but the correspondingly greater demand for chilling. Hardly a recipe to warm the heart of a low-techie such as myself.

But the further I have gone into the literature, especially the older material, the more I have encountered clear evidence that chilling isn’t actually the Holy Grail that modern literature emphasizes. I’ll hold off on all but the barest details (the futher in ya go the bigger it gets as they say - current reading is, egads, the book “Postharvest Biology of Apples and Pears” out of the East Malling Research Station in '73) except to say here’s how one modern scientific abstract puts it. The ubiquitous David Sugar, again: “Winter pear cultivars are unique in requiring postharvest cold treatment to induce autocatalytic ethylene production and develop the capacity to ripen. The necessity for postharvest cold treatment may be overcome by exposure to ethylene at relatively warm temperatures.” Or, in low tech, old-school lingo, confirmed by older texts, it appears we can do away with chilling by placing ripening fruit next to the fruit we want to ripen. There will be a wrinkle or two to that story, of course, but the essence is, Ethylene Is Our Friend.

I can, of course, be an ‘enemy’ too. And this brings me to why I have a strong sense my porch-based storage facility appears to be letting me down just now. I have 25 varieties of pears all stored together. My earlier-ripening varieties with my later-ripening varieties. I’ve been checking them every morning (“Who’s breakfast?”) and yesterday, the scent of pears had picked up markedly. Volatile esters. All of a sudden, what I have on my hands is an ethylene-producing factory, a “Ripening Machine”, and I strongly suspect that I am going to have a tsunami of ripening pears on my hands in the next couple of weeks, no matter what the outside temperature does. Much as one can lengthen pear storage by keeping ethylene levels low, so the presence of ethylene prompts an intensifying ethylene flush. A 'Come Join the Party" thang.

I have an odd sense that taking the pears off my ‘semi-enclosed’ shelves and keeping them in a basket in the open air may actually help delaying ripening at this juncture. One of the triggers for my interest in winter storage derived from witnessing a friend who kept a basketful of Goldrush on his porch through the course of the past couple of winters, weathering the full gamut of porch weather, including freezes. The apples kept through the end of March. I suspect that one reason they kept so well, given the rough-and-ready setup, was because of the ventilation that an open basket afforded – airing off the ethylene. Literature suggests there appears to be an interesting dance with pears in particular. They need ventilation, but are more sensitive than apples to too much of it.

Oh, on the subject of apples, this caught my attention this week. From a 1901 text:

--

In an experiment made by the Canadian Experimental Farms, in which several varieties of apples were stored until May 28th, the order of superiority in keeping quality was as shown below. The figures give percentages of apples remaining sound at the end of the experiment.

Ben Davis 100
Wagener 88
Rawle’s Janet 82
Winesap 82
Walbridge 73
Lawver 49
Pewaukee 29
Salome 20
Fameuse 12
Haas 0
Gideon 0
McIntosh 0
Anisovka 0

--

That 100% figure rather raises an eyebrow, doesn't it. Anybody have any experience with Ben Davis?

n