If it's a Bradford, you'll not get any usable fruit - the fruit of a Bradford pear is the size of a small marble. From your description of the parent tree, sounds like it might well be some other sort, though. At any rate, you have my sympathy - most of us gardeners are prone to pounce on a find before considering exactly how we'll make it work. Good luck!

Ha! Goldylocks, that is too funny!! Do stupid things in the back? No way, think of all the missed oppurtunities. I've only been 'gardenening' a few years myself and I proudly march about the front yard moving bushes bigger than myself from hole to hole.
It's even more fun to put bamboo poles everywhere as mock trees to get an idea (ha!) of how a real bush/tree will look. (Good luck) The neighbors must wonder if the spirit of Vlad the Impaler lives on in me. Last year I had a virtual forest of bamboo, now the planted trees are little brown twigs.
Being able to garden by cigarette lighter or while holding a flashlight in your mouth has GOT to be a marketable skill.
I hope it wasn't a Bradford, though. Ick! The stink in spring makes me gag, and no fruit. But well done!

G'Day!
- i guess my worst gardening mistake so far has been planting lilies and daffodils and other "deer-resistant" plants along the pasture fence, thinking that if the deer don't eat them, neither will the horses. Well, the horses mayn't EAT them - but they DO playfully rip up anything they can reach through the fence! This is especially true of sections they tend to hang out near when impatiently anticipating breakfast or dinner.

- i tacked mesh to the back of the fence last fall, so they horses can't reach through the fence anymore; now i just need more lilies and such to re-plant with!

- The following counts as garden relaited because the recipe included lots of herbs dried from my last summer's garden: i just baked a loaf of herb bread with unequal parts of three kinds of flour. i use the 1/2 C. measuring cup to scoop the flour, because the full C. cup won't fit in the bag as easily. Somewhere along the way, multiplying by half scoops and divinding be different flours, i got distracted and mis-counted and wound up with half again as much flour as the recipe called for. Added enough of the other ingredients to fill out the enlarged recipe, but figured, since loaf usually barely reaches the top of the pan, it would just round up nicely. Wrong. It rose and rose and overflowed. It baked beautifully, and i was able to tip it out of the pan intact, but the profile was like a mushroom, the top coming down the sides almost to the base. But tasty none the less!

- Happy gardening,
-vlad

Here's one: I accidentally dumped two egg cartons full of germinating seeds upside down on the kitchen floor. Including 4 varieties (3 tomatoes & 1 pepper) that I didn't have any more seeds of.

I scooped up all the dirt and seedlings and patted them back into the egg carton willy-nilly. I will have a puzzle section of the garden this year, try to guess what's what as it fruits.....

Luckily the source of the 3 tomatoes I lost offered to send me more. Wonderful woman. I'm sure I could get a replacement for the pepper too, but that's OK. It was a freebie I don't know anything about anyway.

OK my turn

When we moved in several years ago I wanted to pave the walkway around the back of the house past the small shed and oil tank. I dug down for a paving base and encountered some roots that had to be dealt with. Funny thing one of the roots I cut spouted oil!!
Luckily I had built a small door to the cutoff valve on the oil tank enclosure I'd built. The oil tank apparantly had been moved and the line was not where I expected it to be.
Now when I bury lines such as a 110 volt line for walkway lights, I put them through a conduit and put a board above that. I'm also very careful before cutting roots or digging anyware there might be lines, such as at the fence line where I discovered the cable TV line going around a fence post I had to replace yesterday.

It's been a couple of years, and what actually brought me to GardenWeb, so I'll share this story again.

We moved to the country July 27. Not much could be done, I thought, at that point about clearing the property of brambles, vines, suckered trees, etc., but I thought I'd try.

One day, after yoga class (I mention that because I want you to remember that yoga clothes are cotton and lycra, somewhat stretchy.) I went outside and began to cut the suckers off the trees, pulling miles and miles of vines out of them, and chopping down the brambles. Foxgrape covered the 2nd story of the house, trumpet vine made the fence line a solid mat of green, and brambles poked through everything else.

The cell phone is God's gift to my husband, who spends a ton of time driving from job to job. He therefore calls me a gudzillion times a day. I kept dropping my phone as I was working, so I stuck it in my sports bra. That got sweaty, so I stuck it into the other side. It kept falling out (not me, the phone) when I would bend over, so I looked around and stuck it into the back of my pants. After awhile, it started sliding down (like the potato joke), so I stuck it into the front. When that got hot and sweaty and started sliding down, I finally threw it up on the porch in disgust. He could wait to talk to me!

I worked a while longer, pulling, cutting, chopping, and cleaning.

The next day, on the way to yoga again, I noticed an itchy bump in my shin. "That d@mned dog," I thought, "has FLEAS!" See, my deceased MIL's dog had come to live with us. The famous, patient, and affectionate General the Golden Retriever. I indignantly showed my husband, who took one look, began to belly laugh, and said, "Hon? That's not a flea bite, that's poision ivy."

Well, I'd managed to massage poison ivy all over my body while trying to hold onto that d@mned cell phone. It was so bad, it was steroid resistant, and when the doctor drew a line on my tummy, within the hour it had broken out 2'' past the line. Ironically and thank God, it never erupted into sores, just a huge burn-looking, all-body rash.

I'd never been so miserable in my life. The result is that I am now allergic to the DIRT the roots have been in. That oil is evil stuff!!!

But imagine me diligently ripping those hairy vines out of the trees? I learned the weeping trees along the fence line weren't trees, but posts so covered with thigh-thick poison ivy, that they grew up and out like weeping cherries.

Yes, I had the land professionally cleared in the spring. Probably the best investment I'd ever, ever made.

But now I can wince and laugh!
Christine

Mom's house is painted a tannish color and we were doing some raking and cleanup work yesterday. She was cutting and pulling a tough sapling and saying "this thing is growing out of the house!" As she looked up she saw it was not a sapling but the phone line - painted tannish!