I don’t know about you, but I’ve been noticing that our food prices are starting to go up at the grocery store.
I am Sam Groffof Beyond TP and Milk. I’m ready to chat with you about some of the serious things about why Ellie and I created Beyond TP and MIlk. So our original venture was the idea that during the pandemic, a lot of people were confused about what was going on and started buying up all the TP and milk and panicking.
There’s a lot of other ways to be prepared. And you know, one of mine is in my fluffy butts (chickens). They’re so much fun. Yes, they are cute and cuddly and fun and amazing. And some people would view them as pets.
I view them as a resource. They are a sustainable food source for myself and my family. Each chicken for multiple years will give me eggs, and they’re amazing layers. I’ve got a bunch of different breeds that are here on our little property. And we have ones that are really, really good with our kids.
So they have a coop, which is the big green thing. And then they have a massive run. Now, again, chickens aren’t for everybody, not everybody has a whole lot of space, but for us, that was a sustainable easy way for us to be able to take care of things.
Now, am I the best chicken farmer? Probably not. There’s so much more I’m still learning. Like in the last year I pulled all of my old CDs that we weren’t using anymore and I put them out thinking that would be a fun playtoy for them. We always hear that chickens need to be entertained.
But an added bonus was by putting these up has actually helped us keep predators away. The flash in the nighttime and during the day from the sun distracts the predators and keeps them away.
So that’s the beauty of the simplicity of sustainability and utilizing the resources that you have on hand and finding out how to make the best out of them.
So with Beyond TP and Milk, and with chickens, one of the simple tasks that we’ve done is try to make our yard sustainable for our chickens. Now, mind you, when we moved here, this backyard was entirely full of trees. That means our whole backyard is super lumpy. We’re missing chunks of ground because of roots riding out from the bottom and under the ground. But that means that our ground is super duper fertile. We have a lot of extra nutrients and things available to us in our soil, but it doesn’t look the prettiest for most people.
So that’s why we’ve mulched around the chicken coop and around the shed. But that mulch, remember, it was free. I told you about that.
The second thing is it’s adding a layer of soil and nutrients as it decomposes into our backyard, into our landscape. Now, the neat part about what we did with this mulch is that it’s not just the mulch. We have straw in here.
In the wintertime, what we do is around the base of our chicken coop, we have it open so that the girls can get in and out underneath there. They have extra living quarters where like, you know, their chickens. We want them to have as much freedom and free reign as possible. But with that it’s also ventilated all summer. So it helps keep the coop cooler. But in the winter when it gets cold, we completely surround the base of our coop with straw bales.
Now that’s a two-fold exercise. What it does is it’s a windbreak, but in the springtime, what we use it for is to create a layer of soil for ourselves. So we put the straw underneath the wood chips and the girls then start mixing it all up because they’re chickens.They love to scratch. That scratching, that mixing brings us a new layer of nutrients to the soil. It gives the chickens entertainment. It adds to the healthy ecosystem and sustainability of our yard. And it gives us an easy babysitter for the chickens when they’re out and about in the yard, because we do like to let them free reign when we’re out here working.
So sustainability and worrying about the food chain is only going to get you so far until you actually start putting it in action. My husband and I started doing this and putting these things in action slowly, not everything’s going to happen overnight. That’s the biggest thing I can stress to you.Try one small thing at a time.We tried the straw bales underneath the chicken coop two years ago. It worked amazing.
We did it again this year.The year that we did it the first time, we put the straw directly into our garden beds and we made lasagna gardening. It was on your beds, whatever you want to call them. And that was effective. So now it’s every year, how do we sustain that sort of stuff to bring it about so that our land, our property is helping us continue to maintain our stuff. Well, everybody, have a good one.
Again, this is Sam Groff signing off for Beyond TP and Milk.Enjoy one small step in sustainability because I’m telling you right now, we are on the verge of seeing things that we haven’t seen in a long time in this country with pricing. We gotta be starting to really come full circle and take care of it in our own homes. All right.
Have a good one, everybody. Bye.
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
I’m sitting on the ground inside my berry patch. Um, so why am I down here? I’ll show you.
During the height of the pandemic. I bought 40 – and I repeat 40 -strawberry plants. They were bare root strawberry plants and let’s be realistic, only one of them survived! One.
Now I have two 12-foot long sections of my garden that are two feet wide full of strawberries from ONE plant that survived.
Am I the best strawberry gardener? No, evidently I couldn’t keep 40 plants alive, and they were bare roots, strawberry plants, but one survived.
And now I’ve got a plethora of strawberries, to the point that I actually shared them with other people. So what does that have to do with sustainability and Beyond TP and Milk?
Well, here it is. What I’ve done now with my strawberries is I thinned them out and I’ve now separated them into two full garden beds from ONE plant.
I let the ONE plant take over last year, send runners out everywhere. It looked like a hot disaster nodule in this spring when everything was still like, just waking up, and pretty cold. My husband and I spent an entire day breaking up this bed that was full of strawberries.
So the strawberries are an amazing source of just awesomeness for us and our family. Our kids love them. We love them. And you know, we’re not gonna probably jam as much or do any of those kinds of things with it, but we do eat them like crazy.
What makes this sustainable isn’t necessarily that I have lots and lots of strawberries and strawberry plants from one plant. What makes us sustainable is that I was able to then share this with other people. I had so many strawberry plants when we spread them apart that I was able to give them to two other families who now have deck boxes and put them in their garden at their house.
And that ONE plant will become even more prolific and in sustainability and looking at just the reality of how our environment and how the political scene is, and how everything is going on with our economy, we need to start really thinking about the people around us.
Now, mind you, I live in a community with a lot of people who are much older than me. So instead of trying to barter with them, what we have done is just built-in goodwill.We give away a good portion of our produce that we don’t eat?
We save, we store it. We do all the things that we need for our family for full sustainability for our household. But we also share our bounty and we share our wealth and our abundance and in doing so, we’ve gotten it back 10 fold in just the three years of living here.
So when you think about sustainability and you think about everything with the pandemic and things like that, and you hear the term ’prepper’ and homesteader, think of it not necessarily in those contexts. Think of it more as you’re building community, when you start really stepping outside of your box and you realize, okay, I want a sense of preparedness. I want a sense of being safe.
You can’t do everything for yourself. You can try, but you’re going to burnout.But if you build a community of people around you that you support and that support you tenfold, you’ve got a wealth of abundance that you never even knew you had.
And I can say that hands down from truthful experiences, just living here in my own neighborhood and sharing eggs with people.
And my husband was at work before the pandemic even happened. And our pipe burst. And I didn’t know where the shutoff valve was in our house, but I knew my neighbors did because they had been in our house before we had even owned it.
So I sent my kids to get my neighbor. He came over and helped me find the shut-off valve. He actually started helping us with the piping, not because he had to, but because he was kind and what we were able to do then was just get brand new pipe and fix it. And all was good in the world.
But all that came from saying hello
…and giving a smile and a dozen eggs that I had an abundance of that anyway, at the time.
So when you think about sustainability, don’t just think about what you can do. Think about what you can do to maximize yourself through your community. And you’ll be surprised at what you’ll get. It’s just like my strawberries. ONE little strawberry became this whole garden.
Enjoy yourself. Bye-bye.
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
…easy crop to grow and you don’t even need a trellis.
How do I know you don’t need a trellis?
This is the first year in umteen years of gardening that I’ve ever been able to trellis my peas. Now, when I say umpteen years, my husband and I had a garden up at our community garden for four years. And now we live here – this is our third year. We’ve had peas every year and every year we have never successfully trellised our peas.
First time ever trellising peas. Now, look, this is a really simple trellis system. It has three stakes. If you had bamboo sticks, you could use those, um, and some wire to hold it up. That’s all it is. We are not fancy people. When it comes to this kind of stuff, we just want simple and easy.
The funny part of trellising is that sometimes your peas do not want to listen to you. Specifically, they’re like … kids! (Watch the video.) This pea is like, so determined to hang on to this little garlic! (rather than the beautiful trellis right behind it)
As soon as the peas are done, we have the cukes that were started by our neighbor. They will then trellis up like nobody’s business!
So as you’re gardening, think about how you can maximize space.
This season I’m going to get a huge, massive yield out of it. And just by being able to put the cukes there, following the peas, it’ll actually put different types of nutrients in the ground.
So what do you plan with your space? You know, you really want to think about your garden. But don’t let the “thinking part” hold you back. Sometimes failing epically, like we did for almost six years, is worth the journey.
Take it (p)easy, everybody 🙂
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
I’m here doing a sustainability gardening channel. I am not thinking I am a cool beans. What I am is somebody who has epically failed at tomatoes multiple years in a row.
I used to love growing tomatoes.
Then the last four years, I have really just hated growing them. I grow them because I love to eat them. And they have a definitively different flavor than the ones you get from a hothouse and the grocery store. But what’s my problem. I have been gardening my entire life? Why have I struggled with tomatoes until this year?
Oh, until the end of last year, beginning of this year, I didn’t realize that there were different types of tomatoes. Obviously, I know that there are different breeds of tomatoes, but there are actually, definitively, two different types of tomatoes – actually three.
Determinate – INdeterminate and Semi-Determinate
I just learned that one while doing more research within the last week! The two types of tomatoes typically are determinate, which just flat out means “Bush.” Why can’t they just say, this is a “Bush tomato (determinate) vs indeterminate – vine” – tall, massive tree-like thing. It would make life so much easier if they wrote these things on the tags. Okay, maybe they do and I didn’t know what I was looking for.
If you try to plant them (determinate and indeterminate) the same way and you try to grow them the same way, you’ll have the epic failure that I’ve had every year.
So this year in my garden I put Amish paste tomatoes, and, um, I put six of them in one bed. There are bushing tomatoes. So I’m going to try to use the age-old theory of caging. We’ll see if that works. I’ll keep you posted.
Well, what I wanted to really let you know about in this video is that there are three types of tomatoes, they’re determinate, which are the short bushy ones. Then there are the semi-determinates, which are the three that I staked into my garden in a totally separate bed from the Amish paste tomatoes. They are a Celebrity tomato and are semi-determinate. So I put massive tree stakes and I’m not joking. I put massive tree stakes in the soil next to the plant so that as they grow up, I will be able to continue to trellis them for lack of a better term to that tree stake and not have it fall over every year.
Now, mind you, none of these, these tomato plants, have I grown from seed? I have not. I have bought them at a local nursery.
IMPORTANT: Um, now the one other thing that I learned about tomatoes is they’re in the nightshade family. Something about their leaves is toxic to specifically chickens and I will do more research and get back to you on that.
The Wrap UP
So to wrap up, there were three types of tomatoes. I am going to be trying different methods this year for different kinds of tomatoes. And I will keep you posted on our progress to see if we are successful or just epic failing.
Keep going and keep trying new things in your garden. Like this year, I’ve never potted tomatoes. We’re going to try something new and it’s making me happy. It’s exciting. You’ve got to find that loving thing for you because sustainability is about what lights you up and makes you happy.
If it’s the sustainability of knowing how to make bread in your kitchen when there’s no more yeast, you can do an awesome sourdough! Rock on! If that’s how to be able to wash your dishes or wash your clothes with a washboard when they decide to actually cut off all the water to your house, because wait, they have to replace fire hydrants.
That’s what sustainability is really – kind of going back to those grassroots skills-based things that we all kind of let lapse because of industrialization and just because of the convenience of things.
But as we’ve learned, hopefully, we’ve learned the resources aren’t always available, and sometimes we need to buckle down and know how to take care of ourselves. So enjoy tomatoes, enjoy gardening. Find that one thing that lights you up, people, talk to you later.
Bye bye.
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience, and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
While Sam is nursing a hand that she managed to scrape a few layers of skin off while trying to help pound a few stakes, I thought I’d share a bit of our philosophy behind “Beyond TP and Milk.”
This past weekend, I saw a news report about average folks becoming preppers. Well, not like we think of as survivalists and preppers, but realizing that they should consider how they might be more prepared after surviving Covid lockdowns, political unrest, and various trials of Mother Nature.
Here’s the news video link from CBSN aired on March 12, 2021:
Another one from CBSN aired on December 30, 2020, was the piece about buying chicks to have eggs for their family in the future:
Both of these videos show the average person beginning to re-think preparedness in relation to their families, ordinary people having experienced some pretty extraordinary circumstances during the past year.
When Sam and I talk about sustainability and being prepared,
… we aren’t necessarily talking about guns, a hidden hideout in the woods, or years of food storage. Most of us are unable, or choose not, to do that. But we have experienced empty grocery shelves and the change of lifestyle resulting from the lockdowns of the past year – job upheavals, financial situations in turmoil, homeschooling our children, delayed product deliveries, and more. Many folks had to run from fires, floods, or deal with snowstorms, and loss of utilities.
As a result of these experiences, many more of us are trying to learn new ways to be better prepared. No more rushing to the grocery store in the eleventh hour. No more fear of ‘what will I feed my family?’ No more waiting for the customary stores inventory-on-demand, waiting for ships and planes that are behind schedules, delivery delays by the post office, and other things out of our control.
Go-Bag
I often ask folks if they are prepared to grab a “go-bag” in case of impending emergency? What would they include if they didn’t know when, or if, they would return to their home? So the basics begin there. Here are a few items to consider:
important documents (laminated if possible or in a waterproof folder)
medicines for several days to several months plus possible prescription copies
basic first-aid items
personal sanitary items that may not be easy to find in a disaster
extra clothing – ideally offering you a few layers
food items and water
batteries, radio, flashlight
blankets
Of course, there are a host of other items you may consider, but that’s a good start. There are many online sites that will give you lists as well as your county emergency services, etc.
Home Garden
Sam’s focus has been to have you think about your family’s well-being, especially in food sustainability. A garden that gives you healthy, fresh foods and offers a variety that can be canned or frozen. A bounty that can give you a sense of security no matter what the grocery stores have available. But we both know that along with these items for our own families, a bit of abundance gives us items to barter. Remember, when times are tough, having something to ‘trade’ can make a tough situation a bit more comfortable.
As we hope for a loosening of all the ‘safety’ precautions in coming months (or years), it’s easy to think the rough times are behind us. If that is how you’re thinking, STOP! 2019 was an amazing lesson. It can happen again. It can happen anytime. We can throw our arms up and say, “Oh, I didn’t think it could happen to me.” Or… we can learn some lessons and figure out at least a few basics that will allow our families to feel a bit more secure.
Children
I highly recommend including everyone in the planning. Children can be quite creative and I think it adds to their own sense of security. They can have a backpack of items that will be important to them if they had to get out of the house fast, or if the electricity was out and they had to entertain themselves. It also can give children a sense of control by choosing what matters to them. You can even play a game and have them use their backpack of items for a day or a weekend to test their choices.
Preparedness is not fear. It’s the opposite. It’s being ready. So don’t forget the lessons you learned during the past year. Consider how you might make a similar situation safer and more comfortable by being prepared.
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
So why am I here with the pitchfork in front of what looks like a pile of dung? Well, it’s because I am!
Mushroom soil is really common where I live and it’s great in my garden. Let’s talk about some mushrooms.
We make raised beds here at our little house and we use the soil that’s already here. But we have to amend it because we have a clay mix.
So in order to do that and not have to pay a ton of money to get lots and lots of fancy soil delivered by a fancy place, we’ve decided to amend our soil with mushroom gold. We’ve used that every year – for about a hundred bucks. Boom! And it’s great stuff. Local companies around where we live take animal manure, animal waste, and mix it with old food scraps, creating this beautiful soil mixture that obviously mushrooms used at one point to grow.
You can see even see some of the straw and the wood that’s in it! In our garden beds, it adds those rich nitrates and nutrients to the soil. It provides luscious food for OUR food to continue to grow. We bought 3 or 4 cubic yards for $100. Every year this guy comes back willingly and this mushroom gold helps us grow abundant crops.
Between us, we have over 100-years of experience and Sam’s only 39! If you enjoy our life hacks and simple common sense approaches to sustainability and everyday life, please spread the word.
So sustainability and worrying about the food chain is only going to get you so far until you actually start putting it in action. My husband and I started doing this and putting these things in action slowly, not everything’s going to happen overnight. That’s the biggest thing I can stress to you. Try one small thing at a time. We tried the straw bales underneath the chicken coop two years ago. It worked amazing. 
