Dorothy,

Since we don't have a lot of folks here on this forum who grow pear trees, you may want to go to the GW Fruit and Orchard Forum to ask this question in order to get an answer from the fruit experts there, or at least to do a search on that forum and see if you can find any prior discussion of fruit damage similar to what you're seeing in your pears.

I know that fire blight can affect the fruit of pear trees, but since I don't grow pears here in OK, I haven't seen it first-hand so am not sure what it would look like on/in infested fruit. I never saw it affect the pear fruit in Texas, but the climate there was usually drier and less humid than it is in your part of OK and pear diseases seemed less common there than they are here. My brother had a friend who successfully grew pears in Texas with no spraying of the trees whatsoever, and he got great harvests (of ugly but edible fruit). I cannot imagine anyone being able to do that here with our spring/early summer humidity.

I do have a couple of ideas about what might be causing your pear fruit issues, but they are just guesses.

The knobbiness makes me wonder if the flowers suffered from incomplete pollination, causing some of the fruit locules to develop poorly, if at all. Sometimes you can get deformed fruit from other issues that occur in spring when the fruit is really small, and it can show up randomly depending on whether it was caused by hail or variable insect damage on young fruit or whatever.

Then, the mention of gritty, corky spots sounds to me like stink bug damage. Did you have lots of stink bugs this year?I have them all over my tomato plants some years and they cause similar damage to tomato fruit. I know that stink bugs can cause damage to fruit of any kind, not just tomatoes.

Those are my best guesses for a cause of the fruit issues.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn. I'll try that. Our tree's pears were seriously deformed, while my Dad's and daughter's trees had only a couple dozen out of hundreds of pears. We had quite a few stink bugs in the garden so there may have been some on the pear tree too. We didn't look that closely.