Za Hara Eggplant
Seeds have stories. Sometimes those stories get lost. People forget. Somebody who knew where the seeds came from might hand a few to a friend, saying “these are great, you should try them.” And in an instant, the history of the seeds is broken, forgotten. I bought a packet of Za Hara eggplant seeds from the great seed stewards at Sand Hill Preservation Center. Sand Hill has a lot on their hands, stewarding hundreds of varieties of rare seeds with the goal of getting small seed companies to re-discover excellent varieties of the past. It takes a lot of dedication to do that, and they’re selling their seeds at a bargain price using paper order forms.
Za Hara sounded like a name from the Middle East, and I was interested in trying out some desert eggplants here in the high desert of Colorado. They were the best-performing eggplant in our 2022 trials, and we grew them for market and for seed in 2024. The plants were huge, and some weeks we were trying to sell hundreds of pounds of eggplants to whoever would take them. A local chef said they were his favorite.
But beyond that information, the story of the Za Hara eggplant has been severed. At Sand Hill, their description was 8 words: “75 days- large plants with rather large fruit.” Our friend Kevin who helped found Groundwork’s Food Systems Fellowship in 2021 is a scholar of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, and he says that “za hara” could mean several things—is that an “s” like “sahara” or is it something else? The sounds from Arabic don’t transliterate well into English. So this month’s seed story is the story of what happens when we lose track or forget.
You can find Za Hara eggplant seeds grown on the Groundwork Farm in 2024 at Vibrant Earth Seeds. We hope you can make some new stories with them—stories about eggplant curries in August, stories about the most delicious eggplants that you stuff with whole garlic cloves and roast in the fire every year on your mother’s birthday, stories about that one legendary year when the eggplant trees grew 12 feet high and dropped eggplants the size of watermelons onto your porch. I hope that you remember your seeds’ stories, and the you’re adding something worth remembering.