How to Espalier Pear Trees Over an Arbor

In today's episode, Beverly Welch is joined by Angela Chandler of The Garden Academy, our Partner in Education! Angela and Beverly show different ways to train pear trees over your brand new arbor!

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- [Beverly] Welcome back to The Arbor Gate. I am Beverly Welch here with Angela Chandler.

- [Angela] Good morning.

- Our partner in education with the Garden Academy. So we're in our little high-density area that we've been taking you guys through for several months now. And this is our newest project. An arbor.

- It's so beautiful.

- I love it. So we're going to train [[00:00:30]] some pear trees over this arbor. So step one, build an arbor. All kidding aside. Step one is to pick a structure. We're so fortunate to have this gorgeous arbor, but you can use anything. A chain-link fence, a wood fence, the side of your house, a common trellis, or a common arbor, but any structure will work. The main keys, step two is picking your tree. Typically, pears and apples lean themselves best [[00:01:00]] to this type of training.

- They do. What we're gonna do, Beverly, is formal espalier. And so apples and pears are long-lived, and they maintain their limb structure over time. So they're much suitable to formal espalier. If we were going to do an informal style, we might choose something like a peach or a citrus.

- Okay. Now I chose a pear, and I chose a particular variety called Tena Suey, which is an eating pear which is fairly hard to find for us.

- It really is. And it has a little bit of an Asian [[00:01:30]] pear-crossed in it which gives it smaller grid cells a very delicate flavor.