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Cultivating Place: For the Love of Apples: The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project

Photos courtesy of The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, all rights reserved.
Photos courtesy of The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, all rights reserved.

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. 

Photos courtesy of The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, all rights reserved.
Photos courtesy of The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, all rights reserved.

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.

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Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate. Particularly interested in the intersections between gardens, the native plant environments around them, and human culture, she is the daughter of garden and floral designing mother and a wildlife biologist father.
Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.