Kieffer Pear Tree

The toughest, most forgiving pear you can grow — a heavy-bearing heirloom that shrugs off heat, cold, and fire blight while loading its branches with crisp, spicy-sweet fruit.

The Kieffer is a classic American heirloom, a cross between the European pear and the hardy Asian sand pear (Pyrus pyrifolia). That sand-pear blood is its secret: it gives Kieffer remarkable vigor, disease resistance, and a firm, slightly grainy flesh with a distinctive aromatic, spicy-sweet flavor. These are old-fashioned "cooking" or "canning" pears at their best — superb for baking, preserves, butters, and spiced pears — and they sweeten nicely off the tree if you let them mellow indoors.

Why growers choose the Kieffer

• Famously dependable. Kieffer is one of the most reliable, productive pears in America, prized for bearing big crops year after year with very little fuss.
• Wide adaptability. Hardy in zones 4 through 9, it tolerates both hard winters and Southern heat better than most European pears, with low chill requirements that suit warmer regions.
• Fire blight resistance. Its sand-pear parentage gives it strong natural resistance to fire blight, the disease that destroys many other pear varieties.
• Largely self-fruitful. Kieffer can set a crop on its own, though a second pear variety nearby will reliably increase your harvest.
• Long-keeping fruit. The firm flesh stores for weeks in a cool spot and holds its shape beautifully when canned or baked.

At a mature 15 to 25 feet tall and a relatively narrow 5 to 10 feet wide, Kieffer makes an upright, long-lived orchard tree — a single specimen can supply a family with fruit for canning, a productive anchor for a backyard orchard, or a hardy choice where finicky pears have failed before.