Grójec

How apples came

The specification of the protected geographical indication (PGI), Jabłka grójeckie, traces the district’s orchards to Queen Bona, known for her interest in gardens and fruit, who received large estates around Grójec in 1545 and granted privileges to the keepers of market gardens, and in 1578 a royal act of her son put fruit growing on a firmer legal footing¹; a study of the county’s farmland likewise dates its fruit-growing tradition to the sixteenth century². In the nineteenth century the leading growers were four priests: Roch Wójcicki at Belsk, Stefan Roguski at Goszczyn, Edward Kawiński at Konary and a priest named Niedźwiedzki at Łęczeszyce¹.

Commercial orchards came with the twentieth century. Jan Cieślak of Podgórzyce refined the growing and keeping of apples and in 1918 built the first fruit store in Poland, and in 1909 the adviser Witalis Urbanowicz drew up his “ten commandments of horticulture”¹. A narrow-gauge railway from Warsaw, opened in 1898, was planned as a fast, cheap link between the capital and the fruit-growing country to its south, and between the wars its freight trains carried apples, pears and other fruit from around Grójec³. After the Second World War growth was rapid. At the urging of Professor Szczepan Pieniążek the Institute of Pomology and Floriculture was founded to pass new knowledge to growers, and his student Eligiusz Gajewski set up its experimental station at Nowa Wieś, which became a model farm for the district¹.

When the harvest failed in 1958, Wacław Przytocki, deputy chairman of the district council’s presidium, started an apple blossom festival to promote the fruit and the region¹. The orchards kept spreading: they covered 32,790 ha of the county in 1996 and 54,191 ha in 2010, when they made up 69% of its farmland against 36% in 1996, a change sped by EU funds after Poland joined the Union². The name Jabłka grójeckie was entered in the EU register on 5 October 2011⁴.

Then came the Russian ban. Russia stopped imports at the beginning of August 2014, just before the harvest. It had taken 55% of Poland’s apple exports in 2013, 676,000 tonnes; in 2014 exports to Russia fell by 41%, and that autumn processors paid 10 groszy a kilogram for apples⁵. At Grójec the BBC met a grower whose biggest customer had always been Russia, and a co-operative that had sent up to 20 lorries a day across the Russian border⁶.

How they’re grown

The PGI covers all of Grójec county and neighbouring municipalities of Mazowieckie and Łódzkie provinces, on the Warsaw Plain, the Rawa Plateau and the valleys of Białobrzegi and the central Vistula. Its podzolic soils on sand and clay are of middling to poor quality, rain averages 600 mm a year and the growing season lasts about 200 days; in September and early October night temperatures can fall to 0 °C, which the specification credits for the apples’ quick colouring and their sharpness. Apple trees grow in every village from Grójec to the edge of the area, and around the town crop concentration reaches 70%, which is why, the applicants say, the region is called “the biggest orchard in Europe”¹.

The orchards have grown denser. Until the late 1990s orchards averaged no more than 1,000 trees a hectare; commercial orchards planted after 2000 hold up to 4,000, depending on the species². PGI orchards on dwarf rootstocks are planted 3 to 3.5 m between rows and 0.5 to 1.2 m between trees, and are run under integrated production, GlobalG.A.P. rules or organic methods. Under an amendment approved in November 2023 the fruit may carry residues of no more than five pesticides, each at no more than half the EU limit^1,16. The same amendment allowed apples marked by frost or healed hail to go for processing, because hail and frost during flowering are becoming more frequent with climate change, and it dropped the fixed harvest dates¹. In 2026 frosts at the end of April did the most harm, damaging blossom and young fruit to differing degrees across the country, and heat waves at the end of June brought heavier fruit drop than usual in many regions⁹.

What’s picked

Poland has the EU’s largest area of apple orchards: 32% of the Union’s 444,000 ha in 2023⁷. Its growers picked more than 3.8 million tonnes of apples in 2025, 12.9% more than in 2024⁸; in September 2026 Statistics Poland put that year’s crop at more than 3.1 million tonnes, about 17.7% less⁹. Mazowieckie province grew 1,756.0 thousand tonnes of tree fruit in 2024, 47.1% of the national crop¹⁰.

Grójec county is the centre of it. Data from Poland’s agricultural payments agency, reported in June 2026, give the county 35,241.13 ha of apple orchards that year, about 69% of the province’s 51,292.35 ha; the municipality of Warka alone had 7,120.46 ha¹¹. The PGI’s applicants credit the district with almost 40% of Poland’s apples¹.

The PGI admits 44 varieties, from Gala, Golden Delicious and Idared to old varieties such as Antonówka, Kosztela and Malinówka, added by the 2023 amendment¹; the most important, according to the agricultural quality inspectorate, include Gala, Gloster, Jonagold, Golden Delicious and Ligol⁴. Until 2023 the specification set the harvest from 10 September to 31 October, early varieties excepted. Apples for long keeping are stored at 1–3 °C and must still have the firmness set for their variety when they leave the store¹. In 2014 the BBC reported that half of Poland’s apples were exported, and that half of those exports had gone to bulk buyers in Russia the year before⁶.

On the table

The specification prizes the district’s apples for their sharpness, usually 5% above the norm for each variety, which it says processors across Europe value¹. The blossom festival begun in 1958 has gone by several names and is now Święto Kwitnących Jabłoni¹; in 2026 it was set for 23 and 24 May on the market square at Kobylin¹². In 2024 Grójec’s cultural centre invited home bakers to compete for the title of “Queen of Szarlotkas” (translated) at the town’s traditional apple festival on 14 September¹³; a szarlotka is a shortcrust cake or pastry with apples¹⁵.

The Polish word for apple is jabłko, the fruit of the apple tree¹⁴. Sad means orchard, as in the place names Sadków and Sadkowice, and apples appear on the coats of arms of the county and of several municipalities, among them Chynów, Belsk Duży and Błędów¹.

Notes

• Jan Cieślak’s fruit store at Podgórzyce, built in 1918, was the first in Poland¹.
• In a national survey of September 2008, 19% of Poles associated the Grójec area with growing apples¹.
• Between November 2014 and February 2015 Poland’s apple-juice sales to the United States reached a record 21,020 tonnes, against almost none a year earlier⁵.

Where the sources disagree

• “The biggest orchard in Europe.” The name is the PGI applicants’¹; no comparative statistic was found to test it.
• Share of Poland’s apples. The applicants’ “almost 40%” of national production¹ is not an official statistic. Statistics Poland gives Mazowieckie province 47.1% of the country’s tree fruit in 2024¹⁰, and in 2010 Grójec county had 14.8% of Poland’s orchard area².
• Area. The 2010 census counted 54,191 ha of fruit trees and bushes in the county²; the payments agency’s 35,241.13 ha for 2026 counts apple orchards declared for payments¹¹. They measure different things and do not make a trend. The 2016 study also gives the rise from 1996 to 2010 as 40%, although its own figures, 32,790 ha and 54,191 ha, imply about 65%².
• Harvest months. September and October come from the PGI’s former harvest window¹, which excluded the early, summer varieties; no source read gives their picking months.
• Variety names. The PGI lists one variety as “Shampion”¹; it is left out of the list here because its registered spelling could not be checked. The inspectorate’s list of main varieties also names a Jonagold sport, written here as Jonagold⁴.