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An Easy Trick to Pollinate a Solitary Pear Tree

I haven’t got much room for trees at my house, but I wanted one fruit tree, and I love pears. So in 2021 I ordered a pear tree through the Washtenaw County Conservation Department’s plant sale. I biked it home from the Farm Council Grounds in Saline on a beautiful day spring day.

Two bundled up trees - just whips, no leaves - on the back of a cargo bike

That tree has thrived since then and is now almost even with our second-story windows. Last year it had many flowers, only one of which became a pear. We watched that lonely pear until it fell and was gnawed on by an animal.

I knew that this pear tree (Blake’s Pride) was not self-fertile. But it can cross with any other pear, including the Bradford Pear, aka Callery Pear, a loathsome invasive cultivar that looks pretty, smells awful, and breaks easily. You may already know and dislike it. I just searched up “Bradford Pear” and see Missouri is set to ban it from being sold – good stuff.

Ann Arbor has many of these misbegotten trees. One grows half a block away from me and I was hoping that would be close enough to do the trick. But our yield of one pear showed it was not.

What to do? I considered trying to hand-pollinate between the Bradford Pear and my pear. Their periods of flowering overlap. But that would be tedious and I can’t reach the top half of the tree.

Then an idea came to me: I would clip a bough from the Bradford Pear and hang it in my tree. Insects would alternate between the two kinds of flowers and not know the difference.

It was free and took five minutes. And it worked! I have dozens of tiny pears set on my tree:

A close up shot of a pear bough with a few tiny developing fruits

The clipped branch’s flowers wilted after a few days, but it had been long enough for the bees to do their business.

I have a bee hotel in my driveway maybe forty feet from the tree. I credit those little solitary bees with doing the work here. They didn’t have to repay me for hosting them but it’s sweet that they did.

Bee hotels are neat. Here’s a picture I took in 2020 during COVID lockdown of a large bee hotel at the Michigan State University Children’s Garden:

a large green bee hotel labeled "Native Bee Hotel" with many pieces of wood with drilled out holes

Mine is only the size of one of those rectangular blocks on the top shelves of this hotel.

We’ll see how the harvest turns out, but I’ve solved the pollination problem!

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The future of the People’s Food Co-op

MLive reports that the People’s Food Co-op is in financial trouble, having lost money since 2012.  I joined PFC shortly after moving to Ann Arbor in 2009 and have been a supporter and shopper since.  Here are my thoughts.

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Batch 76 (?) – All-Malt Lager

Batch 76: All-Malt Lager

My batch numbers might be mixed up, I may or may not sort that out.

Brewing: brewed March 15th.  OG 1.050.  Big boilover, long cleanup, but everything went fine on the beer side.

It was an 18 gallon batch, two vessels of pale lager and a third that got an addition to make it a Dark American Lager.  To make the dark share, I put a half-pound of crushed Carafa II (or III?  See recipe/BCS book) in 2 quarts of hot water, steeped it like a big tea bag til it cooled, then added to fermenter.

Fermentation: fermented in 50F ambient cellar space.  Pulled up to 64F for a diacetyl rest around 1.020 gravity, which was 5 days (CCYL lager yeast) and 7 days (single pack pitch of 34/70).  Let sit around in 64F for a couple more weeks.

Packaging: kegged the CCYL batch on April 11th, it finished around 1.000 FG for a bit over 6% ABV.

 

Recipe and batch notes: https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/light-and-dark-lager-partigyle/brew-logs/153459.

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Beer Homebrew Recipe Uncategorized

Batch 72: Frank’s Imperial Stout

Having my brother in town as a helper, we decided to brew a partigyle beer: 11 gallons of Imperial Stout and a 2nd-runnings Mild.  I used the same recipe I came up with for the first beer in the Knob Creek barrel.  That beer was outstanding after blending with 10 other people’s beer and barrel-aging; as I recall, mine was pretty good going into the barrel, too.

The recipe was a mix of a few credible recipes.

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Brewing process Homebrew Recipe Uncategorized

Smoked Porter 2015

Over the 4th of July, I smoked about 3 lbs of Pils malt on an old potbelly stove.  It smoked with mesquite chips for a few hours in two batches, then was left to condition for ~7 weeks in an open paper grocery bag.

I first brewed a smoked porter with home-smoked malt in 2011.  I used alder chips then, in an homage to Alaskan Brewing Co.’s Smoked Porter.  It turned out well and the bottle I opened yesterday as I brewed the 2015 version has aged nicely.  The biggest flaw is that the smoke flavor is too phenolic.  I tried to avoid chlorinated water throughout the process but may not have succeeded.

I brewed this year’s smoked porter on the same potbelly stove I used to smoke the malt.  I’ve already written about the process of brewing on the potbelly stove, so I’ll stick to the recipe and batch notes here.

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I have a blog

Why a blog?  I have two main purposes in mind:

  1. Opinions & ideas that are too long for my Twitter my Mastodon.  I’ll probably tweet toot links to these posts.
  2. Knowledge management: I often make things after reading on the web about how to make them.  Sometimes I think, “the internet was wrong” or “I could explain it better than that.”  Now I have a space to see whether I can make some small contributions to human knowledge that others might stumble upon and benefit from.  I benefit tremendously from internet knowledge so I ought to give back what I can.
    1. I will also benefit from my own notes on past projects.  In particular, I use Brewtoad to design homebrew recipes, but lack a good system for storing notes on the process & results.  I like how the Mad Fermentationist logs his brews on a WordPress blog.

Given that this may be a jumble of posts on DIY, beer, electoral politics, data analysis, etc. I expect that very few people will read through the blog continuously or follow it.  But if a few of the right readers find each post via other means, that’ll do.  And if no one reads it, at least I have a place to take notes.