"Magwitch" wrote in message
...
anton muttered:

I want to do espaliered pears around our new vegetable plot - a 3-sided
boundary measuring @ 12 metres per side. There will not be walls or
fencing
just the post supports, wires and the pear trees.

What I need to know is how many pear trees do I need for this

2 or 3 trees per 12 metre- side, depending mainly on budget, rootstock
(Quince C or A), & how high you want to go.

and how many
of each variety/pollination group,

with 6-9 trees you shoudln't get any pollination problems unless you pick 5
late-blossoming & one early.

should they be planted side by side or
interspersed?

I'd probably start at one corner with the earliest and run progressively
round the edge to the latest. 12m is not far for a bee and so I don't think
positioning is crucial from a pollination pt of view. If one edge/ corner
is more sheltered than the others I'd place the earliest flowering in the
more sheltered position.

I'd like Doyenne de Comice which would need a Group 4
pollination partner. Which other varieties would you recommend?


Er, anything but Comice? It's terribly prone to scab, and so you will have
to spray it to get any crop, whereas most of the others are more or less
disease-free. My Comice is overdue for the chop as I don't spray and so I
get more or less nothing from it. I'd single out Concorde (son of Comice
and Conference) and Williams (bears at a very young age) as varieties that
I've had good experiences with.

Imho, the big deal with pears in particular is to get a range of ripening
dates, e.g:
http://www.btinternet.com/~treesandfruit/pear.htm
You need to pick them when they are not yet ripe; store them in a cool
place; inspect them every couple of days, and then as the yellow blush
spreads, bring the riper ones into the warm and give them another day or two
to completely ripen. For any one variety, you only get a week or so of
delicious juicy manna-on-a-stalk in large quantities. (But it's never a
glut- they are far too delicious to ever have a glut of pears).

So I would suggest:
1. Don't plant any 'repeats'- each tree should be a different variety.
2. Get as wide a range of ripening dates as possible, then check the range
of pollination classes you've got. It's most likely that with at least 6
trees, your pollination will be fine.

have fun

--
Anton