Solved: Baldwin Pear

[Tom]

Just get in the ball park

[Gordon]

Looks like PawPaw

Gordon

[CHARLIE]

I can't remember the name of them, but those are the pears that grow in South Georgia and North Florida. The ones that taste sooooo goood but are so hard they'll peel your gums back!

[Texas Ranger]

I think Charlie has it, pears so hard they are only good for cooking, and then for a while.

[Tom]

Yep, it's a pear.

This is a Baldwin Pear that grows in my front yard.  I say grows, it is really hanging on.  This ground is fairly flat and falls to the creek.  It is about 18" of very acid sandy clay on top of blue gumbo that goes to china.  Plants have a difficult time here because the constant water sheeting over the terrain keeps the nutrients washed out of the dirt.

That which volunteers, grows pretty good.  What I plant has to be force fed.  This little tree is maybe 10 ft tall and is 12 or 13 years old.

A Baldwin is an Eating/cooking pear and is considered more of an eating pear here because gets soft enough when ripe to eat without breaking your teeth out.  When you bite into it, it crunches like a Granny Smith Apple and juice runs down your chin onto your shirt.

It is accompanied by a Kiefer Pear which is an honest to goodness cooking pear.  It is small, about 1/2 the size of your fist and hard as a rock.  It doesn't get nearly as sweet as the Baldwin but makes good preserves and is valuable to cross pollinate the Baldwin.

I guess Pears are our Apples down in the far south.  Some specific apples grow here but very few.  It is just too hot all year for most of them.  Pears like a little cool too and North Florida is about their limit. It is few homes in N. Fla, Ga. and Ala that don't have a Pear tree.

The Bowl Turners like the wood when they can find a trunk large enough but most trees branch out about 3 or 4 feet from the ground.

I love to snoop around old, defunct towns.  There is one on the St. Mary's River, N.E. of Hilliard, Fl., named Orange Bluff, that used to be a logging town.  Not much history to be found in books but a lot to be found in the woods.  

It was founded in the early 1800's and had it's heyday in the late 1800's.  The turn of the century found it going away and by 1910 it was gone. Few pictures exist, so I did most of my research in the woods listening to old folks tell me where they remembered things being.

One very interesting point an old man told me as he sat one winter beside the pot bellied stove in the general store in Kings Ferry,  was the existence of a pear orchard of the "best Sand Pears to found in the area".

One day I was snooping around the old site with my metal detector when I noticed that some of the shrubs and rotten trunks of small trees among the pines and oaks appeared to be in a line.  A trunk would be only 6 or 8 inches in diameter and most would be gone from rot.  Few leaves existed and I don't know what was keeping them alive.  This was what was left of the Pear Orchard.  Excited, I tried to grow these trees at home from cuttings and even tried air-layering in the woods for a couple of years but had no success.

The old town site is threatened by bulldozers from the pulp wood company who owns the land and only 4 or 5 acres remains untouched.  It may be gone now.  I don't know because they gated the property to keep the vandals out.  They have always let the general population use the site for camping but the low-lifes trashed it up so much that the paper company got tired of trying to keep it clean.

One day I would like to approach it from the river and see if that orchard still exists.  I may be the only one left in the world who would know to look for it.  Next time I'll take the cuttings to an expert and get them to root them.

[CHARLIE]

Tom, most of my wonderful vacation was spent traveling up and down some Florida Rivers, one of which was the Ocklawaha. I purchased a book about Steamboating on the Ocklawaha River in the 1800's into the early 1900's. There was a lot of logging going on at that time. Anyway, I was amazed at the number of, now nonexistant, towns or "landings" up and down that river and I suppose Orange Bluff was a "landing" on the St. Mary's river. It probably died when steamboating came to a stop.

One thing I thought interesting was the way they tranported the logs down the Ocklawaha, and probably other rivers. They would make a bunch of rafts, each made of 8 to 10 logs (for some reason, they left a space between each log and fastened them together with limbs. I don't know if they nailed the limbs to the logs or lashed them.). Then they would couple each "raft together with a single log running lengthwise, which would literally make a "train" of rafts. Then one man with a long tiller (made from a log) would be in the front to guide the "train" down the river. What is interesting is that the "tiller" stuck out forward of the whole train. I'm not sure how this worked, but it must've 'cause there is a picture of one and the man looked somewhat happy. I wonder what might happen if the first raft hit a snag and all the following ones piled up behind. I bet he wouldn't be happy then.

[Gordon]

Once I saw the word PEAR the little light bulb turned on.

Really gets you thinking when your going through the woods and come apon an old foundation. The stories that the foundation holds. Guess if your lucky with a metal detector you might just be able to find out some of the stories, that is if your lucky.

Years ago there could have been a small town at a landing and now once again the forest has won. Everything is overgrown with little or no visable signs that anything was ever built there years ago.

Gordon

[SwampDonkey]

Just something I picked up off the tube recently....

Just think, the Chinese have to gather pollen and dry it, then take a feather duster to their pear blossoms to get fruit. If you had to do that here, I guarantee we wouldn't have a home grown pear to eat.

No bees.

[Tom]

For a country that is supposed to be without bees, China is certainly flooding the American market with Chinese Honey.  The Wholesaler's  yard is full of drums with hen scratching all over them.  They help to keep the price of honey down.  The bee keepers don't care for it because Chinese honey isn't produced under the same restrictions as American Honey.

I think that story of them hand pollinating pears might contain a lot of hype.  It could be that they are trying to keep the pear pure of pollen from other species and somebody thought it would make a good ecology story since they could back it up with a picture. 

[SwampDonkey]

Could bee Tom. I don't recall seeing any imported honey here though. Although, I have no idea where that Billy Bee honey originates from. Mine comes from a man near Moncton, NB.

[SwampDonkey]

Well I just looked it up.

http://www.billybee.com/en/story/worldwide.shtml

[Tom]

We and our resturaunts still eat local honey most of the time, but bulk honey is big business.  It's used by the ton in making cookies, breads, etc.  That's were the money is and were the chinese honey is seen.  If you dont visit a wholesaler, you would probably not know.

here's one link:
http://www.confectionerynews.com/news/ng.asp?id=53255-china-continues-to

google Chinese honey in the USA for many others.  Yes, Canada imports honey from China too.

[SwampDonkey]

It doesn't seem we import a lot because the demand isn't there. Big country, small population. We aren't even mentioned in the statistics of that report for imports of honey. The only mention is about a ban imposed on antibiotic contamination of the Chinese honey.

I will say, I don't like Billy Bee honey because it tastes like plastic to me, no matter what they say on their website.