Hope and Practice: Charles Hoehnle

“I never get tired of watching things grow and develop.”

Iowa resident Charles Hoehnle reflects on a life of gardening, seed saving, and seed sharing. 

“Hello, is this Charles?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Seed Savers Exchange calling.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah.”

As evidenced by a few seconds of conversation, Charles L. Hoehnle, age 86 and an Exchange lister since 1991, is thrifty with words in the way of any upper Midwesterner. “Yeah” is “yes.” It’s also, “That’s right.” Listen long enough, and you hear it’s also shorthand for, “And I was thinking…”  

These are important things to understand about Charles, as he’s a man you must reach by phone or in person (at his booth at the Williamsburg, Iowa, Farmers Market). He doesn’t “do Internet,” and it’s just as well. His expertise is about as brick-and-mortar as a guy can get, having been based in the Amana Colonies of Eastern Iowa his whole life. It was there that he first  learned to garden, at age 10, by helping his mother manage the 3-4-acre gardens adjacent to a central “kitchen house.” 

“You didn’t have a kitchen in your own house,” Charles explains of the communal living rhythms of the Amana Colonies from their founding in 1855 until 1932. “All the cooking and serving was done in a ‘kitchen house’ that fed several families, and those naturally needed big gardens.”

Charles still lives on one of the original platted one-acre lots in the Colonies, room enough for his 150-foot by 40-foot garden and 35 fruit trees—mostly peach, a few apple, and the rest smaller fruits like plum and apricot. 

Iowa State Fair goers know “Hoehnle” as a blue-ribbon name in the annals of its horticultural history. “One of the first years we were married, my wife, Barbara, looked at the state fair produce and said to me, ‘Yours are just about as nice. Why don’t you enter some?’ So I did, and that year—1975—I entered four things and won two blue ribbons. I was hooked.” Forty-nine years later, Charles has accrued three or four top honors in each and every growing season—for nearly everything Iowa can grow, from tomatoes to giant pumpkins to aronia berries. (His 2024 wins include first prize for peaches, ‘Green Gage’ plums, and “any other variety plums,” which in his case include a small yellow variety, ‘Mirabelle,’ he sourced from France.

Charles got interested in the Exchange on the recommendation of fellow Amana descendant Larry Rettig and his wife, Wilma, stewards of SSE’s ‘Ebenezer’ onion and other beloved stock. Today, Charles lists a dozen or more types of seed and some fruit scions on the Exchange; his varied offerings include the ‘Yellow Riesentraube’ tomato, ‘Osage’ orange, ‘Seckel’ pear and ‘Night-Blooming’ cereus (cactus). He doesn’t usually get more than a handful of requests for seed, unless he lists something new. Then he can expect a flurry of activity, with those seeds going out quickly through the mail. 

“When the Yearbook comes every year, I usually spend a couple days with it, looking for interesting things I’d like to grow,” he says. He’s been at it so long, he posits, the seeds themselves are coming full circle. For example, he’s grown ‘Red Foliated’ cotton— “a real pretty plant” with red-speckled leaves—for many years, but as happens in a life of gardening, has recently lost his seed stock to weather, frost, or contamination. “The last person I got seed from [on the Exchange] had gotten theirs from someone who had gotten it from me!” he says with a laugh. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.” Charles gives back to the Exchange, he says, and trusts that others will have what he needs…should he ever need it (again).

In the meantime, you’ll know Charles’s and Barbara’s house in Amana by the standout shock of dried corn and picture-perfect gourds arranged by their front door—decorations they’ve grown and displayed every fall of their life together. “I just enjoy growing things,” Charles says with characteristic humility. “I never get tired of watching things grow and develop.”  

Kristine Kopperud is a writer and editor publishing creative nonfiction and essays. Her favorite SSE varieties are ‘Red Marietta’ marigold, ‘Lacinato’ kale, and any tomato that defies conventional beauty.