Gardening, Victoriously

On July 18, 2009, Trav and I went down to Seed Savers Exchange near Decorah, IA during their annual SSE's Conference and Camp out. Reason being, Trav's sister (under her father's tutelage) gave Trav a hardcover copy of the wonderful Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch. Ms. Damrosch and her husband are both gardeners and authors (check them out at Four Season Farm), and were both speaking at the conference. We did not attend the conference, but Trav did get his book signed! After waiting in line for about 30 minutes, Trav said quietly to Ms. Damrosch, "It's nice to meet you," she signed the book, and that was it. Apparently Steve had a question for Trav to ask her, but neither of them could remember what it was.
After that, though, we checked out the farm, but because it was so busy we did not get see everywhere. We plan to go back at some point, maybe even for the conference next year as the food sounds REALLY good and is all local; as in everything is grown at the farm, or within a 50 mile radius of the farm.
There were example gardens for making salsa, herb gardens, tons of gardens! and an example Victory garden. I thought the sign was neat, especially after Time Magazine devoted a large amount of space towards Victory Gardens this spring, I think when Michelle Obama started one at the White House that apparently echoes Eleanor Roosevelt's from back in the day, and then there's our very own Victory Garden...
Anyways, the whole premise behind Seed Savers is saving and sharing heirloom seeds; they have the largest non-governmental seed bank in the US- now how cool is that?!? I could go on and on about specific seeds, i.e. how they finally found back a certain type of pure Swiss Chard seed in Australia that they had been looking for 10 years for (of course we purchased it along with sweet chocolate peppers, purple tomatoes, Italian broccoli, two kinds of cabbage, and Wenk's Yellow Hots Pepper). It was pretty inspiring for us, for obvious reasons (now I just have to catch up with the weeding again).
So, without further ado, (a small portion of) Seed Saver's Exchange-

Trav checking out the "example" gardens (By the way, a woman shrieked when she saw Trav's SDSU t-shirt, and was sorely disappointed that Trav has never actually been there. He told her he was just a proud brother, and agreed that his sister also thought the new jackrabbit image is just not as good as the vintage version)-
Myself, in the middle of the herb garden- which I bet would be neater earlier in the year before many of the herbs go to seed; but man! it smelled sooo good in there-

Our very own personal Victory Garden (look familiar?)...




Oh, and by the way, in case you haven't heard- We're famous now, too! You can check out our garden, which is now featured in a wonderfully written article, in the Springfield Advance-Press. (OK, they don't have an online paper to check out as they have a circulation of 1,685 according to the MN Newspaper Directory, and you'll have to ask us to see our copy; but Trav's sister wrote us a rave review, and it was pretty neat :).

Happy Gardening,

~Becky