How apples are grown
Plant an apple seed and you get a tree unlike its parent, so every orchard apple is a graft.
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The short version
Apples do not breed true from seed, so growers clone the varieties they want by grafting cuttings onto rootstocks. The rootstock sets how big the tree grows and how soon it fruits. Crews pick by hand from ladders, and sealed cold rooms with little oxygen hold the crop fresh for months.
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Graft a cutting onto roots
A seedling apple is a gamble, so nurseries join a cutting of the wanted variety to a separate rootstock. Dwarfing rootstocks keep the tree under about 3 meters and make it bear fruit years earlier.
dwarf trees under 3.0 m
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Mix varieties for pollination
Most apple varieties cannot fertilize themselves. Orchards plant compatible varieties that bloom at the same time, and bees carry the pollen between them.
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Pick from three-point ladders
Pickers climb ladders built to fit between the branches and lift fruit by hand as each variety ripens. A full-size tree can give 40 to 200 kilograms in a year, while a dwarf tree gives far less.
40 to 200 kg per full-size tree
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Hold them in cold, low-oxygen rooms
Sealed storage rooms keep humidity high, oxygen low and carbon dioxide controlled, which slows ripening. This lets a fall harvest be sold all year.
Worth repeating
- More than 7,500 apple cultivars exist, and each one is kept alive by grafting because its seeds will not repeat it.
- Controlled-atmosphere storage for apples was first researched at Cambridge University in the 1920s.
- The wild ancestor of the apple still grows in the mountains of Central Asia.
Where it goes next
Apples feeds 1 line directly.
Keep walking
Sources
Cite this page: "How apples are grown." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/apples