OHxF Fruit?

[R.E. Gould]

I'm ordering up some rootstocks to plant out and eventually top work, and want to plant out rootstocks that have good, reliable fruit themselves (for wildlife) in case I don't get around to top working, or there are issues with the grafts. I have a bunch of Dolgo ordered up.

For pears, does anyone know what the OHxF rootstock fruit is like?

 

[Bowsnbucks]

Very little experience with pears, but we do have 3 at camp. They're on OHxF 87 rootstock. I've seen no problems with them concerning growth or disease. FWIW.

 

[chickenlittle]

Been a while since I researched but there was a lot of info on pear rootstock on the USDA GRIN website. Ohfxf97 is listed as an October 3 ripe date in Corvallis OR. Ohxf87 is at least a month earlier. Those were my main concerns.

 

[H20fwler]

OHxF97 is all I graft pears to, makes a full size tree with great roots for my loamy clay. The scion variety will have more to do with drop time, I have pears on 97 that hold well into Nov and later.

 

[chickenlittle]

I can add a few more comments. OHxF stands for Old Home x Farmingdale. Farmingdale is supposed to be the pollen parent but DNA testing showed the pollen likely came from Bartlett instead.

Based photos of fruit from Old Home and other OHxF fruit, I’d expect OHxF97 to have round or egg shaped fruit.

I did get some late fruiting pear scionwood from the USDA to graft maybe 5 years ago. There weren’t many in the OHxF series that I was interested in because the fruit was early but I did get some rootstock varieties to try along with other pears. I had a tough year grafting that year and not everything survived. I don’t think they’ve shipped scion since that year because of a fireblight outbreak. I’m pretty much done grafting untiI buy a new property with space to plant.

 

[R.E. Gould]

Thanks all for the insight!