For the Love of Apples: The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project

Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

As February is upon us we turn from a love letter to biodiversity writ large to a labor of love in conserving the biodiversity of one iconic fruit in large part born of human labor across the ages and the globe – 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 in this traditional winter season of apple tree pruning, and apple scion wood selection, and the first of grafting season, Jude shares with us more about how The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project ( affectionately referred to as MORP) is preserving historic trees and orchards and simultaneously cultivating food, economic, and environmental vigor in their region, which makes a wonderful model for all of our regions. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.