Education

The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project is currently working with the Montezuma School to Farm Project to plant trees with students at local schools. We offer winter workshops to teach adults and students orchardist techniques including fruit tree pruning, and scion grafting. Help support our efforts to teach orchard and fruit tree education.

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 School to Farm Program, Fort Lewis College's Old Fort Program, as well as to fruit enthusiasts as far away as Cannon City. These collaborations have led to some amazing synergistic finds, making the search for the needle in the haystack possible.