Education and outreach are critical to sharing the knowledge and resources that MORP uncovers and develops. Education has been and will continue to be at the forefront of MORP’s work.
In an effort to preserve the culture and gain community involvement MORP hosts workshops in historic orchards to teach people how to prune and graft, as well as to assess and map the orchards, to learn what is growing there and connect to the living history. Successfully, following these workshops participants have adopted the orchard and its owner to return later on to help. Similarly orchard owners have turned from being overwhelmed by their old orchard to passionate for its preservation.
MORP has also taught these orchard skills to students within our local Montezuma School to Farm Program, Fort Lewis College’s Old Fort Program, the Apple Core Project, Boulder Fruit Tree Project, as well as to fruit enthusiasts across Colorado and beyond. These collaborations have led to some amazing synergistic finds of lost apples, making the search for the needle in the haystack possible.
