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No, I'm not suggesting intention or decision. Most of the time, language works a lot like a biological species: there's no critter or speaker deciding "we shall have this feature!", but instead the feature spreads or goes extinct depending on the role that it performs in the language, alongside other features.
My explanation is all about that role. That is the point of grammatical gender, and it explains:
A pointless feature wouldn't do it.
The fruit vs. plant example is from Italian, not Portuguese (see note*).
It doesn't need to help with the word for an apple seed (IT: seme di mela, lit. "seed of apple"). It's just an extension, a "bonus" of the system; the core is like bambino/bambina, words referring to human beings, we humans tend to speak a lot about each other.
That said, your question reminds me the noun classes of Bantu languages. Gender is just a specific type of noun class; it's possible that some language out there would actually use a noun class derivation of their word for apple to refer to apple seeds.
*note, on Portuguese
Fruit trees in Portuguese get an "origin" suffix, -eira; see e.g. maçã (apple) vs. macieira (apple tree) vs. semente de maçã (apple seed). There are a few nouns where the feminine is a specific type of the masculine, like
but that feature was only rarely used, and it is certainly not productive; I think that it backtracks to Latin neuter but I'm not sure. Anyway, derivation in the modern language is mostly restricted to critters and people.