We’re having a Name That Goat competition on Facebook. The winner will receive the first ever packet of organic marigold seeds from Owning Burton Farm! Weigh in and win!
Category: Livestock
Baby Chicks on Burton Farm – August 2016
It’s Your Birthday, Little Chickens! Twelve babies were born this week (so far!) We did lose one early on, but the other baby chicks appear to be doing great. Some are pure Dominickers, but others are a mix of Dominicker and Copper Maran (Amigo). What color eggs will those chickens lay? There was a cricket in the coop, so Rocky threw it toward the mama, but it wasn’t long before one of the babies was running off with a cricket leg in its mouth. They’re a fast learning bunch, this…
How to Delight Your Chickens by Re-Purposing Junk
Entertain your chickens for free! You likely have a lot of this stuff already (or can find it on the side of the street any given weekend) to be re-purposed into your very own chicken carnival. Yeah! Take the girls to a carnival! So, naturally, when you arrive, you, as the responsible adult, will be analyzing all the activities at the carnival to make sure you and your girls hit all the important attractions with minimal inconvenience. Everyone’s so excited, aren’t they? So while you’re passing by the ticket booth,…
It Never Seems to Rain on the Mountain
It was supposed to rain yesterday. The weatherman had been promising “rain on Saturday” all week. After a hot, dry day with the boys, I figured it wasn’t coming. I screwed the hoses back together, pulled the heavy out to the garden and noticed for the first time the heavy, dark rain clouds overhead. “Nope,” I thought. I’m already out here now, so it’s getting watered. I started watering the garden. It needed the water yesterday. I bet my neighbors (if either of them see me) will think I’m nuts.…
5 Goals We’ve Set for Our 2016 Summer Garden
Five Goals We’ve Set for Our 2016 Summer Garden 1. Grow and eat the best tomatoes and cucumbers that we have ever eaten in our lives. Everyone knows that a farm grown tomato is the best tomato and those supermarket tomatoes can’t even tomato. Tomato. Oh my stars, do I want a real tomato! And the white cucumbers we grew a few years back from Baker Creek Seed Company tasted out of this world delicious, especially when we didn’t let them get too big. I definitely intend to gobble them…
Our Compost + Freedom for Pigs Flotsam & Jetsam
I spent three hours Saturday pulling weeds by hand, clearing 8-12″ wide circles around the new seedlings so there would be less competition for water. It was probably only about 1/3 of our massive garden. I pulled weeds until my hands wouldn’t grip anymore. Surprisingly, the numbness in my hands I usually experience from doing fine motor movement was gone. Pulling weeds _IS_ exercise! I pulled weeds around where a seed was planted but failed to germinate. We will come back today to put another seed or seedling in its…
Two Stinky Baby Pigs
Two baby piglets came home with my husband this weekend! They’re so stinking cute! (And I mean stinky!) Last week, Rocky came home with some new birds: five guinea chicks and a turkey chick! He put them under the heat lamp with the two surviving black copper maran chicks he picked up in April. And while I was there, I walked to the goat house to take a peek at the ducks. They’re getting so big, so fast! And they’re so black-and-white that they look like an old black…
A New Baby! A New Page!
A New Baby! A New Page! Ok, a few new babies. In fact, nearly an entirely new farmbly has been born in the two years since we posted. The most recent was a little billy goat born to Joy and Noel. Three months ago, Noel and Chrissy had a baby girl goat, who has not yet been named, either. Oh, dear. You haven’t met Chrissy and Joy yet. The new crew of Dominecker chickens have started laying eggs and Amigo, the baddest Red Rooster in town, guards them closely. We…
Wind Egg – June 3, 2014
June 3, 2014 These are yesterday’s gifts from our chickens. It looks like we have a “beginner” who has laid her first egg–that’s the first one we’ve seen that tiny! So cute! Hard to believe it’s from a chicken.
Our First Eggs and Our First Garden
May 22, 2014 Hybrid Garden is in the Ground! At long last, our seeds have met the ground! We started out with raised row beds, but because it was too labor intensive this late in the game, we switched to traditional tilled soil gardening. Clint graciously let me stand in the middle of the plot, hold the seeds, and bark out orders about what to plant where…He’s a good man. 🙂 Oh, did you want to water that garden? How are you going to water it??!? No rain in the forecast until…