If you like apples (and who doesn’t), and you are looking for something interesting to read while it’s cold and snowing out, then this story is for you:
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I enjoyed the story, thanks for posting @danCO .
Are you going to try get some scion and grow the Colorado Orange Apple? It sounds like a great apple! Love that color.
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What with apple genetics being mostly red and yellow delicious and Cox orange pippin and MacIntosh and one or two others like Honeycrisp and Gala … it’s important to add some of these old apples to the gene pool in coming up with new varieties of apples.
Homeowners, not big commercial orchards, need to continue growing old timey and rare apples.
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Yup.
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I would love to grow it, I can’t wait to see it around some day!
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I just saw that they’re auctioning off two of of these trees. Pretty wild: Colorado Orange apple, auction two – Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project
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I would like one of these trees to add to my orchard. However, I am NOT bidding with starting off at the minimum bid of $300. I am all for keeping places going and helping them stay in business. This seems like a sort of extortion type of bidding. It would be better, IMO, to do more grafting and selling trees if you really wanted to keep this variety going. Making it this expensive to start off with makes it even more elusive to acquire and harder to get into circulation.
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Just to be clear, my understanding is that the MORP is a nonprofit dedicated to finding, preserving, and advocating rare apples. This is not a business nor is the Colorado Orange apple a common apple. They are trying to keep their organization, and their mission to preserve rare apples, funded. In addition, they also sell grafting wood of this cultival. The main issue is that the tree of origin is a century old and does not have a lot of scionwood to offer so owning a descendant is extremely rare. They are only just beginning to propogate the variety. This is not anywhere near a large scale commercial enterprise. Consider it early adopter pricing from the only known tree left of the variety.
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Yea, and some Silicon Valley billionaire probably buys at auction and
nobody ever sees any scions from those trees. Private collection.
Might be good for the immediate budget, but not a good method of spreading a rare heirloom.
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After researching the organization, I believe they are both raising money and trying to propagate the variety. With very little scionwood to start with, its going to take years for the variety to become more widely available.
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It’s a cool story. It would be interesting for someone to buy it and grow one to fruiting size and find out that it could have easily been called Colorado Red Delicious or Colorado Horse Apple. Hopefully it’s a worthwhile apple and it looks nice, but I won’t get my hopes up until I hear some current reviews. I suspect some apples went extinct for good reason (blah, yuck, disease magnets, …) while some worthy ones were just a victim of circumstances.
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I understand what you are saying and all the things you mentioned about the organization. If this was a tree they truly wanted to get out to the masses they would start growing some trees to either sell the scion wood or to sell trees. Nothing you personally can do to help them. Either they want a quick $300 plus shot of money or take it slower and make more than the $300 selling trees of this once thought of extinct apple variety. Like BlueBerry said, if a private collector gets this tree it will basically never be seen again. That makes it back to being extinct again. Doesn’t seem like a very good business model for this supposed MORP nonprofit to have. They do not have to be a large scale operation to start selling trees once they get enough scion wood. There are a lot of small fruit tree nurseries out there with just a few employees and they are staying in business.
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My bad, I assumed you had read the original story so I believe that is causing a misconception. They are not selling the one and only tree in existence. They are selling a propagated tree as a part of a fundraiser.
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Okay. I read the article and it sounded like to me they were just trying to hurry and sell one to get money to keep their organization going. If I misread it that is my mistake and I apologize. I was mostly reading about the apple itself. I will re-read the article.
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Great story and video! I hope he has the real thing!
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MORP are good people, re-creating part of the historic Colorado apple country and ID-ing old and lost varieties along the way. Their first suspected Colorado Orange turned out to be York or York Imperial but they found and published the error. I grafted it here, then removed. This one is the real deal and they’ll make sure to distribute it far and wide.
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I just got a scion of Colorado (Orange) from MORP at no charge. I sent them some $$ anyway. Last year I indicated I wouldn’t be grafting then and they kept me on their list.
Lord willing I will take a tree down this month & cleft graft CO to the stump (about two inches; tree is fairly young). Will report on results.
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That’s fantastic! I’m curious how the apple does for you. Good luck!
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I posted a photo of the first graft of this scion on the '23 grafting thread. It since has died. Trying again, the second one is rather late in the season, but is looking good.
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It stands on Geneva 30. Now that some leaves are fully formed, I will cut off the supporting foliage. I’m thinking of calling it Orange Colorado to reduce confusion when people who don’t speak Old Heirloom like us hear about it. (They might think citrus instead of Malus.)
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