The End of the Pear Harvest of 2010

Guess that serves me right for shooting my mouth off about our impending pear harvest.  The same storm that flooded the Palmer Underpass over the weekend, also took out our fledgling pear tree.  It snapped right in half.  Unbelievably.  I had it staked with a heavy-duty stake and some zip ties loosely around the trunk.  Looks like the wind didn't think much of my stake job. 

There are 2 branches (which carried most of the fruit) on the main trunk below the break, so the tree will (hopefully) survive, but it won't be a high-flyer for a bit now.  The top that snapped off had some largish pears, so I grabbed those.  They aren't ripe, but maybe they'll ripen up off the branch.  Here they are relative to a quarter. 

Have my fingers crossed that we'll get a couple dozen normal-sized pears off the lower branches come mid-August.