Fire blight, and why you should underfeed a pear
Fire blight is a bacterial disease that comes in through the flowers in warm wet weather, runs down the shoot, and leaves the tip black and bent over like a shepherd's crook. In a bad year it can take a whole young tree. Florida springs are warm and wet, so the question is how to live with it rather than whether it will appear.
The first answer is the variety. Hood, Flordahome, Pineapple and Kieffer are grown here precisely because they tolerate it; a Bartlett will be killed.
The second answer is counter-intuitive: feed a pear less than you think. Fire blight travels fastest through soft, fast, sappy growth, so a well-fed pear pushing three feet of succulent shoot is handing the disease a motorway. One light spring feed is enough, and a pear on reasonable soil often needs none at all.
When you see it, cut it out. Take the affected shoot off at least eight to twelve inches below the lowest visible damage, into clean wood, and wipe the blade with alcohol between every cut. Pruning blight with dirty secateurs spreads it, which is a mistake you make once.
Pollination
Most pears set a far better crop with a second variety flowering nearby. Hood and Flordahome are the classic Florida pairing and flower together. One pear on its own will usually give you some fruit, and two will give you noticeably more.
Pick it hard and ripen it indoors
A pear left to ripen on the tree goes gritty and brown in the middle while the outside still looks perfect. Pick when the fruit is still firm, when it changes from grass green to a paler yellow-green and the little lenticels on the skin turn brown, and when a fruit lifted to the horizontal parts easily from the spur. Then ripen it in the house for a week or two.
This is the step that separates people who think pears are disappointing from people who grow them.