Our kids are Lilly (10), Banyon (8), Ruah (6), and Cyrus (2). When we say Cyrus was born here, we mean it: at 1:40 on a July morning, in a planned water birth on our back veranda, under the moon and stars. Tradewinds Ranch is the only home he’s ever known.
This is where we’re raising our kids, homeschooling, growing food and flowers, caring for animals, and learning what it means to steward the place we’ve been given.
Rooted in Oceanside
We’re both Southern California natives, and Oceanside has been home for most of our life together. Steven has lived here since he was one. We’ve been rooted in this community for more than 20 years, and at North Coast Church for 27.
So when we found this piece of Oceanside in 2022, we weren’t looking for a new place to belong. We were putting down deeper roots in the one we already loved. Two acres, an old ranch house, more than 50 years of flower-growing history, farms and ranches all around us, and enough dirt to get into all kinds of projects we didn’t yet know how to do.
Six of Us, Plus the Animals
We homeschool, which means home, school, and ranch life blur together in ways that are sometimes wonderful and sometimes a little chaotic. Lessons happen around chores. Kids disappear outside and come back covered in dirt. Someone always needs to feed the chickens or has found something growing in the garden. Cyrus is usually right behind everyone else.
Then there’s the rest of the crew: Kylo, our Great Pyrenees, keeping watch; Moon and Coco, our two black kittens; four goats with more personality than seems reasonable; and those twenty-something chickens. The animals need feeding, watering, cleaning up after, and caring for whether it’s convenient or not. Learning to care for another living thing teaches our kids things a workbook can’t.
They aren’t models for a family farm brand. They’re the family running it. Don’t be surprised when our kiddos climb out of the van that we affectionately call The Camel. You’ll understand when you see it. Our hope is to build this with them, not just around them.
Faith, Family, and Service
We are Jesus followers, and our faith is the foundation of our family and of how we think about this place. What we have isn’t ultimately ours. It’s something we’ve been entrusted with, and that shapes how we raise our kids, care for animals, tend the land, and serve people beyond the ranch.
Together we founded Known For, a ministry helping churches and value-aligned nonprofits steward truth in a digital age, and Sheena serves on the advisory boards of several other mission-aligned organizations. Different work, same conviction: take care of what you’ve been given, use it well, and share the good that comes from it.
Why Tradewinds Ranch
We’re not multi-generational farmers. We’re a family learning to steward land that’s been farmed for decades before us. When we arrived in 2022, these fields were still in commercial flower production, leased to neighboring growers by the family who farmed here for many decades. We didn’t bring abandoned farmland back to life. We became the next family responsible for what it becomes.
Today we’re gradually transitioning the property from commercial flowers toward a more diverse family farm: food and flowers, fruit trees and perennials, animals, healthier soil, and habitat. We try things, change our minds, and keep the ones that work. We don’t have it all figured out. We want our kids to see that stewardship isn’t something you claim. It’s something you practice.
For Every Season
There are seasons here when things grow faster than we can keep up, and seasons when it looks like nothing is happening. We’ve known real joy on this land, and we’ve known loss. Through all of it, this place keeps reminding us how little we control. We can prepare the soil, plant, water, and work. But growth is something that’s intentional, in every season, and every story.
Building Something Together
You’re meeting us in the middle of the story, not after it. Cyrus took his first breaths here, under the same night sky he’ll grow up under. Lilly, Banyon, and Ruah will remember when we moved here, when the fields changed, the trees went in, the animals arrived, and ideas from the kitchen table slowly became real things outside. Twenty years from now, we hope all four of them can look around and know they helped make it what it became.
Maybe that’s what we’re really growing here. Not just pumpkins, flowers, and fruit, but roots. Roots in our family, our faith, our community, and the land under our feet.
This is our family, and we’re grateful to call this corner of Oceanside home. Welcome to Tradewinds Ranch.