A Trip to Decorah, Iowa

This past Saturday, Annah and I drove down to to Decorah, Iowa to attend the annual Nordic Fest, which I have been attending most years for the past twelve years or so, but I though that Annah might enjoy seeing a little bit of my Norwegian heritage.

Our first stop was at Seed Savers, which is a farm dedicated to collecting, growing, and preserving heirloom seeds so that the genetic diversity of all plants can be maintained. I have been visiting Seed Savers for probably somewhere around 15 years, and they have a nice store (the barn you see in the second picture below), beautiful gardens, and a fantastic collection of plants.

We spent a while in the store carefully picking through the bags of seeds and discussing what delightful plants we could grow in our yard at our new house in Austin. It was fun trying to plan out our own little flower garden and vegetable garden! After purchasing ten bags of seeds, which included tomatoes, snow peas, cucumber, spinach, arugula, borage, morning glory seeds, chrysanthemums, hollyhocks, and silverbeets. we then went out and walked through one of their small gardens where we took some photos of flowers and had fun being with each other!



The Nordic Fest was not nearly as crowded as it has been in years past when I attended it, possibly due to the fact that it was the last day of the event, but it was only moderately busy when we were there. We got to try a few different kinds of Scandinavian food and purchase some lefse, krumkake, and rosettes. It was fun, although we weren't all that hungry, and we didn't have time to check out the Norwegian Museum there, but we will do that the next time we are down there.


Our last destination, and probably the most fun for both of us, was the Decorah Fish Hatchery. There we got to see hundreds of Rainbow Trout and Brown Trout from various stages of life starting from small minnow-like baby trout to adult trout that were several pounds in size. This hatchery allows you to buy fish pellets to feed the trout as you are walking by and all of the fish seem to know this so when you walk by their cage they all swim around frantically waiting for food! We had a great time there and we look forward to going back there someday!