Pears in the food forest garden are one of the most important fruits. If you live in the far North, as I do, zone 4b Michigan, Pears will be the most reliable and hardiest of all of your fruits.
I have several varieties of pears, some bear reliably, some tend to get their blossoms nipped by frosts in May.
The pear above bore for the first time last year, it is a dwarf moonglow pear and this year it is loaded with blossoms.
One thing about your fruit trees, especially in a food forest garden, you want to plant them in guilds with beneficial plants around the base of the trees, and no grass if you can avoid it as it robs nutrients from the tree. This moonglow guild has comfrey which is a dynamic accumulator and a mulch plant, as well as a pollinator which draws in large numbers of bees. There are also maximillion sunflowers clematis and other perennials as well as spring flowering bulbs, lilies, and others around the base of this pear tree. Moonglow is one of my favorite pears, it is a reliable bearer and it has delicious pears which keep well and don't have gritty flesh.
To the right of the Moonglow pear is a dwarf 5 on one pear tree, I'm not fond of multiple grafted fruit trees as they tend to not be very hardy, but this one is doing OK. It did suffer quite a bit of bud damage with our May freezes, and there are only about a half dozen buds open this year, but it is it's first year to bud so I'm thrilled to find out which pears will bear on which branches this year.
The pears that were grafted onto this tree include : Bartlett, Kieffer, Moonglow, Orient and Ayers. We have other Bartlett, Moonglow and Ayers so are hoping for Kieffer and Orient to bear well, but would be happy if they all bear (although I'm not fond of ayers).
Around the base of this tree are more perennials and bulbs as well as roses, hydranges, hollyhocks and many other plants. There are crocosmia and other bulbs as well.
On the SE corner of our house we have a baby dwarf Bartlett Pear tree, this one also has never born, but has a few blossoms that didn't freeze, so we might get a few pears off of this one this year. There are some forsythia and perennials growing around the base of this tree.
This pear tree is an Ayers. It was totally loaded with blossoms this year and they didn't freeze, two years ago this tree bore so many pears that the branches were lying on the deck. We pruned it back really hard after that and hope to not have such a glut of pears from this tree, as we aren't really fond of the Ayers pears. I have attempted to graft others to this tree to no avail. This tree is underplanted with a lot of perennials and comfrey. There are also now two baby peach trees planted on either side of this tree (2 other ayers pears were there but died).
These two baby peach trees are Semi-dwarf Belle of Georgia peach trees, the above one has a few pretty pink blossoms coming out on it and the below one has no blossoms, but is surviving it's second year in its new home.
We have a couple other trees that MAY be peach trees, we have had poor luck with peaches in our zone 4 b garden, it's really too cold for them here, but I'm a die hard trier...
This tree may be a peach, it has the pink blossoms on it now like the above peach tree, and may have survived from one that was barely alive in the past.
this tree is planted at the edge of the woods, it was the rootstock left after the grafts died of a peach tree, the blossoms at the top are white, not sure what the rootstock was, but some day I maybe could graft peaches back on, or we'll see what comes from the blossoms, probably plum.
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