A rare African eggplant resembles a ribbed heirloom tomato

A rare African eggplant resembles a ribbed heirloom tomato A rare African eggplant resembles a ribbed heirloom tomato that somehow survived a freeze. A tiny pear-shaped yellow tomato from Cuba is still clinging to a tangle of old vines. Von Saunder fixes on a pair of sad-looking pepper bushes with green fruit. She pulls the plants in their entirety and drags them to the kitchen. If she can get the bell peppers to color up indoors, she can harvest viable seeds. Earl, her hyperactive cat, pounces on the vine and munches a leaf.

Most gardeners encounter a vegetable at the start of its growth cycle, as a seed in spring. Von Saunder, 58, is preoccupied with the other end of things, harvesting the newly ripened seed in the fall from plants that have grown for months, fruited and are now dead or dying. Their demise is tempered with the gift of the germ of another generation.

Saving this seed is her livelihood; she's the brains and brawn behind Amishland Heirloom Seeds of Reamstown, in Lancaster County. She has a friend grow some of the bean seeds in Idaho and gets someone to help with the winter seed packaging, but the enterprise is as basic and homespun as it gets. We are sitting around the investigation kitchen table in her three-room 1890s house in Ephrata. This is the nerve center of her entire operation, and at one point, she shows me how her seed is packaged for customers.