Harvest Festival goods crafted with care

Walking into the Harvest Festival Original Art & Craft Show can be a little like stepping back in time.

More than 300 artisans sell their hand-crafted goods at the three-day festival, often demonstrating their skills in jewelry making, wood-working or tooling leather on site. The 43rd annual Harvest Festival stops this weekend at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

Among those throwback vendors is The Land of Milk and Honey, a small family business that makes natural soaps, balms and scrubs on a 5.5-acre property near Fallbrook.

Husband and wife Jeremy Pearson and Jen McMullen embarked on the adventure in 2008, with Pearson looking for a way to use the excess beeswax from the 10 or so hives that he keeps. Both farm kids, the couple already were raising goats, chickens and turkeys, as well as growing citruses and herbs like sage and lavender.

“We milk our own goats, make our own milk and yogurt,” Pearson said. “We’re a real throwback.”

Pearson read an article in a beekeeping magazine about how to make lip balm using beeswax. Soon enough, McMullen put her background in organic chemistry to use and began formulating soaps and balms.

“One year, we put soap in Christmas gift baskets, and everyone went googoo over it,” Pearson said.

The ingredients in The Land of Milk and Honey products all come from the Pearson-McMullen property and neighboring farmers — honey, goat’s milk, olive and avocado oils, herbs and, of course, beeswax. Their soaps, balms and scrubs are made from scratch in a small-batch process and are all-natural, with no chemicals or preservatives, McMullen said. Product prices range from $3 to $20, and sometimes soap ends and pieces for $1. (Note to shoppers: “Pretty affordable for stocking stuffers,” McMullen said.)

It’s truly a family business: The couple’s two young children paint the paper wrapping for the soaps, help with the hives, and milk goats.

Seven years after contemplating a use for all that beeswax, the family are certified farmers with the state, selling eggs, tomatoes, soaps and balms at farmers markets, including Temecula’s Saturday market in Old Town. The Land of Milk and Honey products have landed them spots at the massive Fallbrook Avocado Festival, the Carlsbad Street Fair and the annual Harvest Festival, whose exhibitors are juried for handmade products.

The Harvest Festival is “a chance for the public to get out and see things that you can do in life, (to) teach people a different way of living,” Pearson said. “The goal is to bring people out to see what can actually be done by a person, to meet the artist, meet the person making things.”

McMullen sees an increased awareness among consumers about where and how products are made and a growing interest in the do-it-yourself mindset, both trends embraced at the Harvest Festival.

“The realm is just open, and people are getting more educated and people are getting more aware of their products,” McMullen said.

The couple applied that homemade, do-it-yourself theme to programming this year for the group of 130 or so 4H youths the couple helps lead in Fallbrook.

“We came up with ‘Back to the Past,’ and that’s kind of how we live,” Pearson said. “Most people don’t know how to do things. You put them on a farm, and they’d starve.”

When McMullen and Pearson set up shop at the Del Mar Fairgrounds this weekend, they will have customers waiting for them — both regular festival-goers and fellow vendors.

“My customers, once I get them, usually they stay with me,” McMullen said. “… I have customers who have already emailed me and told me to set stuff aside. … Some of our best customers are other vendors. When we’re setting up Thursday, I guarantee someone will come up and say, ‘Do you have …,’ and that makes me feel good.”

McMullen crafts 150 varieties of soap, but she has three distinct best-sellers: avocado-citrus-sage, with blackberry sage and lemon verbena; plumeria-grapefruit; and blackberry-lemon-sage.

While McMullen offers mail-order through the company’s website, she relishes the opportunity to interact with her customers in person at markets and festivals. “I get better sales, it’s hands-on, they can smell and touch stuff,” she said. “They get to know us. We remember and recognize them. It’s a feel-good.”

McMullen will be on the lookout herself for other artisans’ products at the festival.

“I like that they made it and built it with their own hands,” she said. “I appreciate that because that’s what I do. I think that’s a big selling point for the Harvest Festival. … It really makes me proud to be there.”