Welcome to On the Homestead - we are glad to meet you! We are a family business based in east Texas that is dedicated to the homesteading lifestyle, living simply, and cultivating opportunities for our community to come together, both local and online.
The On the Homestead story is a patchwork quilt of experiences, challenges, decisions, hopes, and dreams. It is ultimately the story of how God has used a whole host of seemingly unrelated things to bring us to this place called On the Homestead.
Growing up, Eric could often identify the smell of pigs in the air, surrounded by the corn and soybean fields of Iowa. He lived in town, but took every opportunity to be outside camping, hiking trails, and spending time on the farms of friends and neighbors, sometimes helping out with the gardens or moving fallen trees, and sometimes just jumping between hay bales and playing hide-and-seek. The homesteading dream would take a long time to mature, but the seeds were planted at an early age.
Candace’s journey to homesteading started a lot later, and is where the patchwork starts to take shape. Candace grew up in the Dallas area, a city girl, and had no experience with anything related to homesteading well into adulthood. However, she has always had a love of learning, and as an adult decided to start learning new hobbies. This started out with painting, then photography, which then led to crocheting to create unique photography props. In time this led to sewing, soap making, gardening, canning, and the list goes on. Her unofficial motto is "I want to do all the things!”
In 2021, a number of things happened that helped push us toward the homesteading lifestyle. First, we felt that God was calling us to buy some land. We didn’t know what that was supposed to look like, so we started looking at raw land all over Texas – in south Texas close to the border, in west Texas in the desert – anywhere that had semi-affordable land. We thought that we would remain in central Texas and have this second property to build up over time. The second thing that happened was a bad winter storm in Texas. While not that bad by Iowa standards, the storm decimated the local infrastructure with a week of no water, intermittent power, and very little heat. Eric was traveling for work, so Candace was left to try to keep our family warm and fed. We were never in real danger, but it was very stressful, and it highlighted the need to have some self-sufficiency measures in place. Later in 2021, we discovered that our house had gone up in value which allowed us to buy a property with a house and actually move onto the property.
We have multiple children with food allergies, and some that react just by touching certain things; so as we have learned more about their allergies, we have also learned more about what is in our food and in our body products. As we began to cut out allergens, we learned more about all of the junk that is in these products and decided to start trying to work them out of our diet and our care products. Sometimes this has meant buying cleaner products, and sometimes this has meant making things ourselves so that we know exactly what we put into it. Along the way, we realized that we really enjoy the making process, and almost always like the end product better than what we would buy in the store.
On the Homestead is the culmination of this patchwork that started with making things for our own family and now expanded to bring clean products for others who are on a similar journey. So, if you are interested in homesteading, already homesteading, looking for community, or simply want to know exactly what is in the products you are buying, then you have come to the right place.
We are starting small with just a few products, including handmade soap, laser cut and engraved products, and crocheted hats; but we have big plans, with you-pick and farm stand strawberries coming this spring, a storefront coming soon, and many more things on the horizon. So, we hope you will join us on our journey and grow with us On the Homestead!
