{Two Young, Old-Fashioned Gardeners}

 ☀We’ve often thought that if everyone was as happy as we are,
this world might be a different place.☀  

Maybe it just has to do with our perspective on life.
We consider ourselves young, faith-filled, old-fashioned, home-grown kind of people.

John and Anni Winings

Maybe it’s because we’re more in love now than we were when we were married 6 1/2 years ago (Dec. 2006).
Maybe it’s because we believe God and Family come first.

It might sound *cheesy* but it’s who we are.
☀ And we know there are a lot of people out there just like us. ☀

We hope people like that will stick around and connect with us.  Because we like to work together, talk together, play together, and garden together.
 And we dream big.  And we like to be around other good, down-to-earth people who dream about amazing things too.

We may be a bit idealistic.  But why not?

① We dream about going to Africa, Indonesia, and the Phillipines to teach about gardening and permaculture. (And we KNOW we’d learn as much from them as they would from us.)
② We dream about having chickens, goats, some pigs, and a cow, and all the wonderful (crazy!) adventures that would go along with that.
③ We dream about owning lots of land (20+ acres would be nice  ) and having our own homestead and permaculture farm.
④ We dream about growing enormous gardens with all the usual fruits and vegetables… and as many unusual ones we can find.
⑤ We dream about cooking and eating and enjoying the fruits of our labors.
⑥ We dream about going to Germany and living there for a while, and taking some time to tour Europe.

We dream about a lot of big and crazy things.

And we know there are a lot of other people dream about some of the exact same things.

Well, this year we’re really, truly, finally going to be doing some of the things we dream about!  We will be fulfilling ④ and ⑤ this year!

We’ve already learned a lot (not least is what the neighbors think of us when we start harvesting greens from the lawn in front of an apartment building) and we hope to learn a lot more this year, which we’ll be sharing on this blog.

Because this year, we finally have some gardens of our own!

It’s John’s last year of his Master’s degree, and we’re living in a little old farm house near the research farms where he’s working while he gathers data and writes his thesis.  The manager of the farms has generously given us TWO plots of ground to garden in this year.

We call them the “Kitchen Garden” and the “East Garden”.

We are so excited to have these gardens.  We started planting seed indoors 3 weeks ago, at the end of January.  Our seedlings are starting to come up, and in the meantime, we have been ordering all sorts of unusual things.  We’ve branched out this year, seeking out vegetables and fruits of all varieties.  Seeds, tubers, roots, and rhizomes are coming to us from Australia, Bolivia, England, and the United States.  And we’re going to grow mushrooms for the first time this year.

It’s going to be an exciting year!