I usually plant the seeds in the fall into a pot/flat and leave it out in the garden for the winter cold stratification, when it warms up you'll have them sprout. You could ask your friend if the seeds went through a cold period, if so, then yes, just planting them.

For my part, the apples, pears and plums are all doing well - the apples, except for the Northern Spy, have leafed out, the pears have pushed 3-4" new growth, and the plums are finishing up blossoming. I may well get a good crop of damsons and handful of golden transparents this year. The quince died back to about 6" from the ground - the second year in a row with significant damage - and I'll probably try to find a new home for it in the fall, to be replaced with at North Star cherry. No die back at all on the apples and pears, and only a few inches on a couple of the leggiest verticals of the green gage plum. The fruit tree list at the moment: Apples: Ashmead's Kernel, Calville Blanc, Cortland, Cox's Orange Pippin, Jonagold, Kidds Orange Red, Margil, Northern Spy, Reinette Zabergau Pears: Comice, Magness, Seckel, Warren Plums: Geneva Mirabelle, Golden Transparent, Green Gage, Imperial Epineuse, Shropshire Damson Smyrna Quince All the pears and most of the apples are in an espalier, and the plums are planted 5' apart and pruned as goblets or bushes, depending on their branching angles. Ian

Surround is working well enough that I will focus on using it from now on. It may not ever help me with Cedar Quince Rust so I may not be able to grow Quince or Serviceberry. There are peach growers that use it to grow organic peaches so I hope it will help me conquer all of those diseases. The forest doesn't belong to me, so I can't do anything about it. This is an old neighborhood and at some time in the past people grew fruit trees - I see old apples and plums all over the place and no one is spraying them so they just harbor all sorts of diseases which just makes my life harder. Last year we noticed in this area that the roadside weed pear trees (hybrid pear, callery pear, bradford pear) were covered in Cedar Quince Rust. The trees are such fast growers that this disease will never kill them but they in turn will act as a reserve and host the disease, much to the dismay of me and all the other backyard fruit growers.

As for how my quince trees are doing, see this other related thread: [Crimea quince fruit review[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/crimea-quince-fruit-review-dsvw-vd~5476273) Kuganskaya is pretty good eating quality, and no doubt if it was crossed with a pear it would lead to something completely edible out of hand. Virtually almost like a Granny Smith Apple but much more acidic. Astringency virtually isn't noticeable in just one or two small slices. Karp's Sweet is still alive and very slowly growing, but it's in a different climate (zone 10 ) so isn't growing as fast as the other quinces. It did set just a few blossoms though last year. It's late December and the tree still has green leaves which have not dropped. I don't really feel that the waxy peel and fuzz are impediments to out of hand eating, so not really concerned about that. (In any case, these "edible" quinces don't really have as much waxy fuzz as the other normal ones)