Pear Harvest Pt 1

Pear Harvest Pt 1

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. It's looking like 2018 will be a great year for consumers to enjoy more delicious pears than normal with growers expected to harvest 20.2 million boxes of fresh pears this year, up 26-percent from last year.

Pear Bureau Northwest's Kathy Stephenson says the earlier estimates appear to be holding true ...

STEPHENSON ... "Yes, absolutely, those numbers are coming through. So, everything looks like it's going to be close to estimates. There's going to be some adjustments. I think the Bosc crop is going to be a little bit better than we'd expected. The thing that's important to us is we're hearing is that the crop is very clean. It's picking and packing out very nicely."

Stephenson says a lot of credit has to go to a nearly perfect weather year ...

STEPHENSON ... "You know, those blossoms come on and it's a time where we have to make sure they stay as long as they need to to get that pear started and then sometimes, depending on the conditions, if it gets too hot early with those little pears some of them will drop and those things were perfect this year. Everything worked great."

She says harvest seasons like this are incredibly rewarding ...

STEPHENSON ... "So, Mother Nature was terrific for our growers and we ended up having a crop that's really distributed nicely across sizes. So, that's exciting. Some years we may have fruit that's larger than the consumer is looking for and sometimes we have a smaller pear. So, this year we have a very broad distribution of size which is important for us for marketability."

Listen tomorrow for more on this year's Northwest pear crop.

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BL: Welcome back to another "Fruit Bites" brought to you by Valent U.S.A. With us as always is Valent's Allison Walston. And this week Allison, we're talking about why we need to stop squashing wasps.

AW: A recent study an entomology journal stated that bees are universally loved while people hate wasps, like worse than flies.

BL: But, wasps can sting and are mean ...

AW: I get it that wasps can be aggressive at picnics and if you step on one of their ground nests.

BL: Like yellowjackets and hornets?

AW: Yes, but they make up less than 1% of stinging wasps. Most of the 75,000 species are solitary. Plus wasps play an important role in the ecosystem, by being predators.

BL: But, aren't wasps more dangerous?

AW: Sort of, but mostly because they are predators. They prey on aphids, psyllids, flies, and other pests. Danger-wise, yellowjacket stings rate equal to a honeybee sting on the Schmidt sting pain index.

BL: Is that helping?

AW: just because they don't have the "cute" appeal doesn't make the threat of their extinction any less. So when you helps bees, don't squash the wasp.

BL: Well, thanks Allison. Join us again next time for Fruit Bites, brought to you by Valent. Until then, I'm Bob Larson.

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-we-really-need-to-be-nicer-to-wasps/

https://extension.psu.edu/programs/master-gardener/counties/lackawanna/news/2015/not-just-pests-bees-and-wasps-have-their-benefits-too

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