Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project
Keeping Colorado "Orchard Country"
The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project compared the fruit of a tree found near Cañon City to botanical illustrations and wax castings of award-winning apples to identify the lost treasure. Read the full article in The Colorado Sun…
DEC 18, 2019 5:07AM MST
Nancy Lofholm @nlofholm
Special to The Colorado Sun
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
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
Did you know that Montezuma County was once renowned for its apple orchards? Local farmers once cultivated nearly 50,000 fruit trees and more than 50 varieties of apples. Today, only bare fields remain. But orchardist Jude Schuenemeyer and the Montezuma Orchard Preservation Project hope to restore the county’s fruit economy. Watch news story at Durango Local News…
By Durango Local News | April 21, 2016
