Grounded in Nature. Guided by Freedom.
Root Freedom started the way most things worth doing seem to start around here — not with a plan, but with a question. A few years back, we started digging into what was actually in the food we were feeding our family, and that one question snowballed into something much bigger. Eight years later, we’re deeper into this than we ever expected to be, and it gets more serious every year.
Who We Are
We’re Chad and Millie, and we live on two acres in Castroville, Texas, with a working farm south of Hondo, right along the Hondo River, where we forage, grow, and test most of what ends up on this site.
Chad grew up in a small Texas town, working farmland with his uncles from his mid-teens on. Hunting deer, dove, and hog, fishing for our own food, and making his own deer sausage every year isn’t a hobby for him — it’s just how he grew up eating. He’s been gardening since he was a boy, and these days he’s the one out walking the property, identifying what’s growing wild, and figuring out how to work it into what we do.
Some of what we write about traces straight back to Chad’s own family — his grandmother used to treat bad sunburns with aloe straight off the plant, and mustang grape jelly and persimmon jelly were just things the family always made, long before either of us thought of it as “herbalism.” A lot of Root Freedom’s native Texas content comes from us relearning and documenting things older family members already knew.
Millie has taken our herbal interest and turned it into real, structured knowledge — she’s completed Nicole Apelian’s Lost Remedies Academy program and is currently working through several Herbal Academy courses as well. She’s the reason this site leans as heavily as it does on real research and formulation, not just tradition alone.
How We Actually Work
Most of what we write about starts the same way — one of us, or someone in our family, runs into a real problem, and we go research it properly before we ever put it on the page. That’s the whole approach here: real questions, real research, and real use on our own land before we’d ever recommend it to you.
We’re not doctors, and we’re not claiming to replace one. What we are is a family that’s spent years — and especially the last eight, seriously — learning this hands-on, from the ground up, on our own two acres and the farm down on the Hondo. We tell you honestly when the research is strong, and we tell you honestly when it isn’t. If something doesn’t work the way we hoped, we say so.
Why “Root Freedom”
Freedom, to us, means having the knowledge and the ability to take care of your own family without depending entirely on someone else to do it for you — whether that’s growing your own food, knowing which plant on your land is actually useful, or understanding what’s really in the herbs and remedies you’re using. Root Freedom is us sharing what we’re learning, as we learn it, from a real working farm in South Texas.
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