Being with Pears

Watercolor Painting by Joyce Dutka

David Fried

There is something almost spiritual about picking fruit from a pear tree.

You look up into the tree and it is looking back at you. It is connecting heaven and earth. The tree gathers its energy from deep within the earth.

What does it ask for in return for all it gives to us? A little hug. A song. A drink of water on a hot day.

When you hold your palm up to a tree filled with pears, it may drop one there and it will sit upright looking around at the world. This is why our open hand is not flat but has a perfect scooped indent just for holding a pear.

Pears are best to grow in threes, even though it sounds like they are called “pairs.” Their pollen is not as attractive to bees as apple trees or dandelions, so, giving them more than just one pollinating partner helps them all to make more fruit.

A pear tree will take a few years to make its first good crop of fruit, but once it gets going, it can produce for two hundred years.

If you get a big crop, you can make perry, which is a cider from pears.

We have been propagating the best pears from around Vermont that are doing well without anybody tending them or knowing where they came from originally.

We honor the towns they came from by naming them after where they were discovered: Barre, Chester, Eden, Greensboro, Robert’s Barn of Hardwick, Huntington, Waterville, and Winoosk. These are towns where customers and friends have told me there were great pears growing wild – pears making fruit for years without anyone making a fuss over them.

When I was just starting out, Greg Williams an amazing grower of plants told me this: “Just grow them like weeds.” I figured that meant let them have their own personality and let them do their own thing.

Pear trees reach for the sky like Lombardy poplars in Italy, that kind of shape.

Once I let one of our crew shorten one that had reached to the clouds. Even though it was making tons of fruit, after that it took about ten years off, complaining.

We dry our pears in a simple dehydrator and enjoy them as crisps all winter. They are very sweet and kids especially love them like this.

We also make jam and spiced cardamon pear sauce with them and they go into a local beer.

Pear trees in flower are a sight to behold with arms of white blossoms lifting up into the blue sky.

If you only have one pear tree you can ask a neighbor for a small blossoming branch from theirs. Sitting in a vase or bottle under your pear tree, the pollinators will go back and forth like pinball.

Will we ever understand the great gifts given to us, getting to live with fruit trees in our world? Year after year the pear tree gives us everything it has got until it goes to sleep for the winter. In the springtime it awakes and grows again right in front of our eyes.

My fellow grower Tristan says that being around fruit trees makes you into a better person.

We have been growing pear trees here for 44 years but we have a long way to go.

Pear trees are patient. They are waiting for just the right moment to tell us the meaning of life.