I have been told by a local orchardist that my pear tree I couldn't previously identify is an Anjou and that it will be another couple of weeks before they will be ready to be picked. Can anyone tell me how to handle them once they are picked -- and the difference between "cold storage" and "refrigeration" of the pears? I could put them in the unheated garage for a month or two, but by then it will be below freezing at night. In previous years I have been unsuccessful in keeping them from rotting. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Cold storage is a controlled atmosphere maintained at a specific temperature and conditions to allow for longer term storage of fruit like apples and pears. The BC Tree Fruit packing houses in the Okanagan are examples of this. It allows them to store them for extended periods of time which is useful when you are marketing the volumes of fruit they handle. If you put your pears into a fridge and keep them there they will keep longer. That is refrigeration. Pears are picked before they ripen and will keep longer that way. When they are removed from controlled atmosphere they start to ripen. It allows for longer storage of the fruit. Hope this helps.
Thanks you. I have picked the pears today and will try keeping a crisper-full of them in my fridge for a month or two and then see if they will ripen -- the others will be farmed out to friends to experiment with. Some of the pears are such big beautiful specimens that it would be a shame to lose them, although others have bits of pitted holes or hard areas that would probably mean they will not keep well in any case.
