Recently in Sustainable Farming Category

We are excited to offer our second season of weekly produce subscriptions from Burns Best Farm. Due to the success of last year's program, we are gearing up for an expansion in 2010.  Mike has been busy for weeks, starting transplants and planning our crop list and rotational schedule. He got our seeds way back in January and we are thrilled to see new varieties of beans, peppers, and tomatoes arriving in the mail.

We are offering a delivery day into East Cobb/Marietta on Mondays this summer in addition to our on-farm pick-up on Wednesday afternoons in Ringgold. Additionally, we are increasing the season from 10 weeks to 14 weeks of freshly harvested fruits and vegetables.

Here's what a couple of customers said last year abour our CSA:

My husband and I were fans of all of Burns Best's produce, but especially the arugula and heirloom tomatoes.  They were delicious, and so different in taste from the supermarket varieties.  Also, in trying to use everything we received in our CSA bags, we learned to be more creative cooks and incorporate fresher ingredients into what we cooked.  We went the entire duration of the CSA without opening a can or frozen bag of vegetables. -Susan

I must honestly say my wife and I were thrilled with the quality, freshness, taste and value of the produce we received during those ten weeks, and we wished the season could have gone on longer.-Karl

Please send me an email:  contactus@burnsbestfarm.com and tell me that you are interested in buying a subscription.  I will send you the document with details that pertain to your location and pick-up day.  

We are looking forward to serving you this summer.  Please contact me with any questions! 

Where has the summer gone?  It seems like just last week we were harvesting our first heirloom tomatoes, yet on Friday I found myself pulling up the t-posts to clean up the tomato garden.  The garden clean up is in preparation for what will be for our biggest fall crop planting ever.  The plots not planted will be seeded in cover crop to replenish the soil. 

Thanks for the wonderful feedback you've given us at the market this summer, and based on your comments (and your purchases) we've invested in what you've told us you want to buy and enjoy.  So far, we have hundreds of heads of lettuce in the ground with a couple thousand more soon to be planted.   In addition, we've planted some fall root crops like carrots, beets, turnips and radishes.  Fall greens include cabbage, kale and collards, and the broccoli was such a great performer this spring that we are bringing it back and adding cauliflower.  The arugula looks great and should be available in a couple of weeks. 

Because I just can't seem to let go of summer, I am experimenting with some later than usual plantings of summer squash and french filet beans.  It will be interesting to see how these crops grow and perform this late in the season.  My friend, Mark Tant, from Tant Hill Farm tells me that the Farmers Almanac is calling for a warmer than usual fall - perfect! 

Burns Best Farm is expanding into some new areas that we will write more about in future posts.  The big news is that we have acquired our first piglets and we intend to raise and market this fine quality pork to our customers.  We've had a lot of interest in this venture already because of the strong interest in locally grown pastured meats.

Lastly, we made the jump this summer into Facebook and we have a fan page for Burns Best Farm.  If you are a Facebooker and want to keep track of special events on our fan page, or better yet, leave us comments that we know for sure we'll be able to access (don't get me started on blog comments on Moveable Type!), please join us there as we build a community of people who appreciate clean, locally grown food.

Until next time... keep buying local!

Mike

Today was a very successful market sales day at the Marietta Square Farmer's Market and a big thanks to all of you who stopped by, chewed the fat, and took home a few heads of lettuce, some radishes to spice up the salad, or a dozen eggs.  Without your repeat business and the encouragement you give us when you buy our produce, this farming gig would be much less rewarding.

In case you picked up my business card today inside the egg carton and you are checking out the website for the first time, I wanted to steer you to a couple of links on other wibsites that do a much better job of explaining our pastured hens and the eggs they lay. (Actually, I can do a pretty good job of explaining it most days, just not on days when I'm up at 4am to sell at the market!)

The Food Renegade discusses the differences in pastured eggs, cage free eggs, and organic eggs.  Before you pick up another over-priced carton from the grocery store, read these descriptions and you'll be more informed about what you're really buying.

Mother Earth News does a great job in this article showing the nutritional improvements in a pastured egg when compared with any other method of raising hens.All of a sudden, eggs aren't looking like little cholesterol bombs anymore, are they? Vitamin A? Vitamin D? Don't we hear everywhere that we need to be getting more of each of those?  I thought so.....

Ok, just one gratuitous egg photo from the file, just because I love them so much:

I have been doing some blog reading lately (I know, you're thinking, THAT'S new and different) and just today have come across two different postings that relate to a subject about which I spend a lot of time thinking.  Some of you have heard me voice concern about where "the country" is headed.  Some of you have politely nodded while I take off on "the economy" and what's wrong with it.  Thanks for listening to me, even if you think I'm nuts.  So on that disclaimer note, here are a couple of other blog postings you should read.

If chickens capture your imagination, you should think about keeping chickens in your backyard. No, stop laughing. I'm serious, and so is this helpful, handy checklist of what to do to keep hens in your suburban backyard.  My chickens have been one of the best parts of moving to the farm and if we had to go back to urban/suburban living, I'd be sneaking some of the girls in there with me.  You should really think about this!  The eggs alone are worth the effort.

All of you who keep a tomato plant in a terra-cota pot on the back deck but wish for more than a flower garden in your yard (or even a community garden down by the swim/tennis complex) need to look at this piece called "Facing the Zoning Monster."  With nationwide food recalls, salmonella outbreaks, and e.coli scares headlining the news each night, you could secure for your family a safe source of just about any fresh vegetable you need.  There might be a bit of civil disobedience required, but hey! It's better than not paying taxes!

I keep thinking that things are not, moving forward, going to be the same as they've always been.  We've been priviledged to see a great abundance of everything, but we may be at a point in our nation's history where greater need will be the rule in the years ahead. 

The time to plant a garden is not when you realize you're hungry.  It's when times are good (or at least better than bad!) and you can figure out what you're doing.  Which means, the time is now. 

(BTW, this is Denise writing.  Mike is not nearly as paranoid.)   

We've been busy this winter working on some projects that have been on our list for a while.  The biggest project was the construction of a new "Egg Mobile."  What is an Egg Mobile?  It's basically a hen house on wheels that serves several purposes here on our farm.

First, because our hens have access to the pasture, they get the added benefit of being able to feast on fresh grass and bugs in the sun and fresh air.  The hens thrive in this environment and the result is eggs that are as much as 20 times higher in omega-3 fatty acids, contain less fat and cholesterol and 40% more vitamin A. The flavor puts a store bought egg to shame.

Second, the hens drop their manure on the fields, making them nice and green without use of chemical fertilizers.  At night the hens move into the trailer and roost on 2x4's that go across the trailer.  The floor of the trailer was removed and replaced with a wire floor that also lets the droppings fall to the ground. The house is surrounded by a mobile electric fence powered by a solar charger, which works to keep the predators out at night.

Lastly, the egg mobile will make our lives a bit easier here on the farm.  Before, we used smaller pens that had to be moved by hand every day.  The egg mobile is moved every 4-7 days.  The eggs will be easier for the boys to collect this summer with the nests on the outside and our newest batch of hens will begin laying eggs (hopefully in March.)

I had a lot of help building the house this winter.  Credit should go to Larry Pierce (Supervisor, metal roofer and siding),  Larry Holcomb (door builder, siding and moral support), David Spangler (Chief Engineer/Siding/Roofing).  Other credits:  Larry H's nail gun - a real time saver.  Cooper Burns (Wire Flooring).  Let me also mention that no OSHA laws were violated during the construction of this behemoth.  We decided against the wet bar on the inside.  We are confident that all corners are "perfectly" square with expert carpentry and any look otherwise is a problem with your eyesight. 

In the next posting I will show you another project that will hopefully help us get more production out of our existing planting areas. See you soon.