Using DNA testing in southwest Colorado, the Montezuma Orchard Restoration project welcomes back apple varieties like Winter Banana, Blue Pearmain, Ben Davis and Esopus Spitzenburg — and businesses are sprouting around them.
MCELMO CANYON — The apple orchard on Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer’s farm in a squiggle of a canyon in far southwest Colorado is a wild place. Turkeys gobble around on the hunt for bugs in native grasses that grow nearly as high as the gnarly limbs of the apple trees. Those trees are set hither and thither instead of lining up in typical tidy orchard rows. They bear apples that few fruit fans have likely heard of: Winter Banana, Blue Pearmain, Ben Davis and Esopus Spitzenburg…read the full article in The Colorado Sun.
Nancy Lofholm
PUBLISHED ON NOV 28, 2019 5:05AM MST
Old apple varieties on the verge of extinction are becoming relevant again and are gradually being identified, propagated and re-planted around the state.
That’s in no small part due to the efforts of Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer, a couple from Southwest Colorado who have made it their mission to find and preserve heirloom varieties and document everything they can about the state’s rich apple-growing heritage… Read full article at the AG Journal Online.
By Candace Krebs for Ag Journal
Posted Nov 3, 2019 at 1:53 PM
At the turn of the last century, the Four Corners area of Colorado was world famous for apples. Varieties like Six-Finger Jack, Colorado Orange and Late Thunderbolt pleased palates and racked up gold medals at world and state fairs. Later many of those varieties were lost in a modern stampede to red-delicious uniformity. But a new Montezuma County project is searching out, identifying, mapping and propagating century-old varieties of apples and sparking an antique apple revival. Continue reading and listen to the story at CPR News…
Story and photo by Nancy Lofholm for Colorado Public Radio, Colorado Matters | May 12, 2016
