- Mike and Denise Burns
Burns Best Farm was started almost as a whim, when we were wondering what to do with a piece of land we’d purchased as an “investment.” Our family was happily settled in the east Cobb County suburbs of Atlanta and we had no intention of relocating to Catoosa County, where Denise had grown up and had family nearby. Nope, we were city folks by now.
And so it was that we thought of planting blueberry and blackberry bushes in the spring of 2003. Gentleman’s crop, we told ourselves. Low maintenance to keep, delicious to eat. We talked our Marietta neighbors into driving the 90 miles between the suburbs and the “farm” to help us plant the bushes. We did that, twice. Oddly, they are still our friends. We did feed them really well after they planted the assigned number of bushes.
After the berries were planted, we got this wild idea to plant heirloom tomatoes. Both of us love to eat in general, so growing tomatoes was understandable: the best tomatoes are home-grown, right? And we had heard that heirlooms were pretty tasty. Plus, Denise was looking for a little cherry tomato like her granny had grown on the garden fence when she was a kid, a variety that tasted like summertime in one bite. We ordered a bunch of seeds off a website, stuck them in peat pots in the laundry room, and hoped for the best.
When that first small tomato crop came in, we were hooked. We brought them back home after weekend trips, and friends and aquaintances oooo’d and ahhh’d over them. Gorgeous, juicy, so flavorful. Best of all, one of the cherry tomatoes we grew completely exceeded our expections and Denise vowed to never go another summer without growing it. Life is too short to eat supermarket tomatoes.
Each subsequent year, we added more variety to our little garden, and then when the berries started to bear more fruit than we could eat, freeze, and give away to those nice friends who had helped us plant, we decided to sell the extra. Both Mike and Denise were in sales professionally, Denise in food sales specifically, and selling organically grown fruit and vegetables proved to be addictive itself.
In 2007, we sold the comfy house in the suburbs and moved to the farm full-time. Once we arrived, we added chickens and turned over lots of new ground to add even more variety to what we’d already been growing. Grass-fed beef cows and forested pigs have joined the chickens in a competition to see how thin we can stretch ourselves and still bounce back and grow. We still sell at farmers markets in the Atlanta area on Saturdays and in 2009, we added a CSA subscription program to our marketing efforts and met a whole lot of new people from our county who are also interested in eating locally, eating seasonally, and supporting the small diversified family farm directly.