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The editors of HortIdeas are Greg and Pat Williams, and we live on a small farm near Gravel Switch, in south central Kentucky (an area known as Forkland). We both grew up in Ohio suburbs. We met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where we both received graduate degrees in engineering. But we left the city and engineering jobs behind and moved to rural Kentucky in 1978. There, we gardened a lot, started the Appalachian Office of the International Tree Crops Institute (for which we published a journal), had a tree crops nursery for a while, and had two sons. Since we were new to everything horticultural, and since we were used to academic researching, we ended up spending a lot of time in the agricultural library, looking up info on gardening, farming, forestry, etc. And we also spent a lot of time corresponding with people and companies involved in horticulture. We found a lot of interesting data on horticultural subjects that never made it into the popular gardening magazines. We figured that many enthusiastic gardeners like ourselves would like to have access to this information also, but didn't have the time to do the research themselves. So we started HortIdeas. More than twenty years later, HortIdeas has hundreds of devoted readers! We also write a substantial portion of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's newsletter, Plants & Garden News, have a regular column in Organic Gardening, and do freelance publishing (both paper and electronic), typesetting, and editing. (If you need any publishing done, we do an excellent job at a reasonable price.) In our spare time, we garden (of course), homeschool our two sons (well they are both officially long out of school now, but we still learn together) [Cam, 27, who collects old tools, loves woodworking, surfs the Internet, and can fix just about anything, and is now an Assistant Scout Leader of two different troops after achieving the rank of Eagle Scout; and Evan, 24, who loves music (and spends a lot of time playing his guitars and singing), is also an Eagle Scout and Assistant Scout Leader, and is a professional carpenter in Ann Arbor, Michigan], and are building a shop for Cam. Greg also is very interested in music, psychology, stage magic, religion, forestry, biology, engineering, computers, poetry, etc. and has thousands of books and papers on all of these subjects. Pat is an amateur artist, sells used books on the Internet, loves being out in nature (fortunately, we are surrounded by it), and is active in our local Forkland Community Center. We all appreciate the freedom to work and learn at home and set our own schedules and agendas. |