Say hello to the child of my afternoon snack! YOU can grow one too, almost passively!

We’re so used to buying fruits and vegetables in the store that we often forget its possible to grow them in our own homes.

I like to eat apples in their entirety, and until I found out that their seeds contain trace amounts of cyanide, I’d literally leave nothing left. At the time, I was eating multiple apples a day, so I decided to start nixing the seeds. As someone who gets anxious about waste, I decided to try and grow the seeds. After many failed attempts, I gave up…until recently.

This wondrous wiki-how explains the steps to growing your own apple tree from an apple seed purchased at the grocery store. Unfortunately, as many articles will tell you, there’s no guarantee that the tree you grow will bear fruit anything like the apple you ate. In a time where GMO and agricultural technologies are at the top of their game, you unfortunately require a cut of the original tree to bear even similarfruit, and even then the care and attention it requires will prevent you from harvesting store-quality apples in your backyard. With luck and a few prayers, though, its definitely possible.

Wait a minute. You said you had “many unsuccessful attempts”?

This brings me to the purpose of this post. A few weeks ago I enjoyed a gigantic pink-lady apple from Costco. For those of you who have never purchased from Costco before, they keep most of their fruit refrigerated.

What does this mean? If you read the article above, the seeds must go through a “winter” of sorts before they attempt to begin to grow. Costco’s refrigeration process mimicked this enough, I suppose, to allow the seed to start growing right inside the apple!

I’ve seen this happen a few times, and almost exclusively when the apple has been refrigerated. (In my first year of college, I refrigerated my apples to save space in the dorm, and many times I would find an apple with the seeds growing inside. Unfortunately, I was in a dorm, and had no where to grow the apple tree!)

So what do I recommend? Do it passively! I recommend refrigerating your apples. It keeps them fresh for longer in my opinion, and you might someday find one with a seed already growing. It takes care of the hard part for you!

The apple tree sprout pictured above was only one of four just barely trying to escape its seed when it fell out of my apple. After a few weeks, the little touches of green turned into two-inch tall sprouts, and I am well on my way to having an apple tree (or two!) in my backyard. It won’t bear fruit for years, but I’m hoping it will be worth the wait.