It's kind of late to get started this year. The cleaned seeds really should have been stored damp and cold (in peat moss or clean sand, above freezing) for three or four months and planted about now. If you have a lot of seeds and need just a few plants, go ahead and plant them now and a few might come up. Or store them damp for a few months in a food storage bag in the vegetable bin of your refrigerator and then plant them in June and hope for the best. Or both.

I just dug some out of the pear me and my daughter ate this morning and thought it would be a good project.

Is there any chance putting them in some starter soil would work, or should I put this project off until Christmas?

Blutarski:

An even better project would be to order in a grafted pear tree of two of known qualities, and plant as soon as they arrive. Your daughter will learn that the best fruit trees are planted from grafted specimens, not seeds of supermarket fruit, and a few years from now, you will be enjoying delicious pears, on smaller trees that you can control.

You can explain to her that trees grown from seeds become very large, very quickly, take years to fruit, and usually end up producing fruit that is of vastly inferior quality.

If you want to experiment with seeds, try radishes.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

If the pear was grown in the US it has been in cold storage all winter and so there is some chance the seeds will germinate now since the seeds may have received all the cold they need. I have had success before in this case. Don is right about the quality of fruit but it probably won't get that far anyway. If on the off chance it does, you can always graft a good variety to it to get some tasty pears - another good lesson.

Scott