Exploring the genomes of half-forgotten and heirloom apple varieties could help to ensure the future of the incomparable fruits.
When Jude Schuenemeyer picked the apple up off the ground in December 2017, he wondered whether his two-decade search was over. It was a firm winter apple, orange in colour with a distinctive ribbed shape and wider than it was tall. “We knew right away that we had never seen it before,” Schuenemeyer says.
He and his wife, Addie, started the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project in 2008 to find and revive endangered heirloom apple varieties. The horticulturalists, based in Cortez, Colorado, had made a few discoveries, but there was one coveted variety that had eluded them: the Colorado Orange. Once a popular apple in the western United States, it had essentially disappeared by 1900. And although the Schuenemeyers had chased a few false leads in the past, this apple — from an almost-dead tree on a private piece of land near Cañon City — looked promising. Continue reading at Nature Magazine…
A century ago, the apple boom was in full swing in Montezuma County.
The home of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado had a high enough elevation and dispersed enough orchards to stave off the codling moth that decimated apple trees on the Front Range and Western Colorado in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
At the peak, there were about 5,000 acres of orchards in Montezuma County, producing several million bushels of apples a year. As of the early 2000s, the county’s apple acreage had dwindled to a little more than 100. Continue reading at Thirst Colorado...
February is upon us and we turn from a love letter to one place, to a labor of love in conserving some of the fruits of human’s labors in many places on earth – apples. We’re in conversation with Jude Schuenemeyer, who with his wife Addie has spent decades discovering, researching, documenting, protecting, restoring, and propagating the rich diversity of heritage apple varieties in Colorado’s southwestern-most Montezuma county.
The diversity of apple genetics in this region traces back 150 years or more, and as apple tree pruning, and apple scion wood selection, and grafting seasons are all upon us, Jude is with us this week to share more about how The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project ( affectionately referred to as MORP) is preserving historic orchards and simultaneously cultivating food, economic, and environmental strength in their region. Listen to the podcast at Cultivating Place…
