Cortez Middle School student Selena Dutchie, 13, gently placed an apple tree into a hole in the ground Friday and covered the young tree with dirt and compost.
“There,” she said with a smile.
Dutchie, along with dozens of other middle school students, planted 50 young apple trees Friday in front of the Cortez Middle School as part of their garden elective class.
For Dutchie, the moment was a fun one.
“I like gardening because everything goes back to the school and I feel like I have helped out,” she said.
The Montezuma School to Farm garden class has contributed lettuce, kale, pumpkins, onions, strawberries, corn and cabbage to the cafeteria, Dutchie said.
But it was the planting of an orchard on Friday, that had Principal Jamie Haukeness telling the first group of students to remember this day as they gathered outside the softball field.
“This is fantastic,” he said. “The kids have been looking forward to this.”
Garden teacher Tyler Hoyt looks forward to the future when the trees will bear fruit and then that fruit will be cycled through the cafeteria.
“Maybe when you are a senior in high school, you can eat some of the fruit,” Hoyt said.
Jude Schuenemeyer, owner of Let it Grow Nursery and local heirloom apple expert, helped the students Friday plant the trees.
“Someday, your kids or grandkids will be eating this fruit,” he said.
To Schuenemeyer, the project meant so much more than providing fruit for the school. It also meant that heritage trees, planted in Montezuma County more than 100 years ago, will continue their legacy. Schuenemeyer started grafting the 100-plus-year-old trees years ago and started the Montezuma Orchards Restoration Project when he realized the trees were starting to die off, taking with them some of the best apples he had ever tasted.
“If you are eating store bought apples, you haven’t tasted an apple,” Schuenemeyer told the students.
The Montezuma School to Farm project orchestrated the orchard planting Friday and Monica Noland was thankful for the project.
Noland, a retired middle school teacher, said that all the grafts came from her Lakeview area orchard from trees planted in 1903.
“At the time they were planted, they were trying to make this area the apple capital of the West,” Noland said with a smile as she watched dozen of middle school students plant the grafted trees.
On her property, the trees are still producing, but a few more die off every year.
Some of the varieties are going with those apples, varieties, Schuenemeyer says we need to save now before it is too late.
Varieties such as the strawberry apple, the Rome beauty and the wolf river apple. Others with well-known names, such as Jonathan and red delicious, are also in Noland’s orchard, but they are completely different tasting than the ones you find today in the grocery store.
“We are losing trees every year and that’s the emergency,” Noland said. “They just have such awesome flavor, so different than the varieties in the store now.”
Also in the group was a variety saved from Noland’s trees, which has since been named the Noland winter honey. An apple so unique, it got a name of its own. An apple that kept in the refrigerator all winter and still tasted like a crisp honey apple when winter was through.
Dorsey Dick, 12, placed compost around the tree he had just planted Friday, he spoke like he had been farming his whole life.
“We only want the sun to hit where the plant is, so the weeds won’t grow,” he explained.
Noland watched.
“I see continuation. This is everything. This is the future here,” Noland said.
slivick@cortezjornal.com
