Who doesn’t want an apple orchard outside their door, showering the lawn with spring flowers and autumn fruit? If you love to fill your outside space with plants that provide food and beauty, you’ve probably thought about growing an apple tree or two. The thought may strike you as you whip up a homemade apple pie (with a touch of sour cream) or chomp on some apple slices with peanut butter: Can I just germinate seeds from an apple and grow them into a tree?
The short answer is yes, you can grow apples from seed. If you successfully germinate and look after the plant, it’ll grow and produce fruit (most likely), but there’s one big caveat. The apples on a tree grown from a seed could be pretty gross. They might be mealy, too small, too sour, or simply flavorless. If you do manage to get beautiful, delicious apples from seed on your first shot at it, you’re lucky, especially if you don’t have any prior knowledge of growing apple trees.
It doesn’t matter if you choose the perfect store-bought apple to snatch a seed from, or pick one from your neighbor’s backyard. The apples from that tree will not be the same as the apple from which you retrieved the seeds. There isn’t much you can do about it, either. The problem lies with the way apple trees reproduce.
Growing an apple from a seed is a high-stakes genetic competition
Apple trees are a heterozygous plant, meaning each plant has its own set of dominant and recessive genes. As the seeds sprout, certain genes will take control and direct what kind of traits the tree will have. Genetic selection in each seed is different, so each apple tree sprout will produce a unique kind of apple. Basically, apple trees take a diversity-focused approach to reproduction, packing a ton of genetic options into each single seed to increase the chances of survival.
If you’re thinking there must be some way to grow edible, delicious apples on purpose, you’re right. Commercial orchards don’t just roll the dice on every tree they plant. Apple trees are propagated through grafting.
Gardeners take a small branch, called a scion, from a tree with a desired type of apples and place it in a slice in the trunk of another apple tree. As it grows, the graft will take, growing into a tree that produces the same type of fruit as the scion. You can graft multiple varieties of apple onto one tree, if you want, so you could create an apple tree that provides Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and even Kiku apples (the sweetest variety around!) — all thanks to grafting. Both grafting and growing an apple tree from seed will take time and energy, so it makes more sense to go with grafting, and grow yourself a tree whose fruit you’ll actually enjoy.
