“I just enjoy growing things. I never get tired of watching things grow and develop.” – Charles L. Hoehnle
Charles has been saving and sharing seeds through the Exchange since 1991—and gardening even longer. From his roots in Iowa’s Amana Colonies to his blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair, Charles’s life is a testament to the quiet power of stewardship, tradition, and seed saving.
Hope and Practice with Craig LeHoullier: ‘Participating in Seed Savers Exchange Changed My Life.’ It is hard for me to believe, but my discovery, joining, and total immersion into Seed Savers Exchange happened in 1986. SSE was a mere child of 11, and I was a young husband, father, and relatively inexperienced gardener of 30. Though I am still a husband and father—and soon-to-be grandfather—my gardening experience has grown significantly, with much of the credit going to the life I’ve lived as an SSE member.
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I’m a lifelong gardener and plant nut. I started saving seeds in the early ’90s when my favorite ‘California Giant’ petunias started disappearing from catalogs and the local store that carried the seeds closed.
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“The corn is one of my greatest teachers,” says Jessika Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk Nation tribal member from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and a Deer Clan member who serves as a seed keeper and farm manager for Dream of Wild Health. The Minneapolis-based organization works to recover knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways.
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“You can’t have food sovereignty without seed sovereignty,” says Jessika Greendeer, former seed keeper and farm manager at Dream of Wild Health in Hugo, Minnesota. “That is why this work is so important.” The “work” to which Greendeer refers is seed rematriation, a growing movement Rowen White, founder of Sierra Seeds, explored in the Heritage Farm Companion, Seed Savers Exchange’s member magazine. “In the Indigenous seed-sovereignty movement, we have begun to use the word ‘rematriation’ as it relates to bringing our seeds home again,”
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