I’m going to start by repeating the vision here because — honestly — if I start out with all the problems and obstacles, I’m going to get dizzy.

The North Star is this:

A New York that’s delightful, easy, and nature-filled — one of rooftop farms, lush balconies, and street-long gardens — where its effortless to feel deeply connected to our land and each other.

Where others see a far-fetched goal, I believe there are two tailwinds that will make it all possible:

• There’s an untapped groundswell of 1M+ New Yorkers who support this vision

• New York has a wealth of underused space (3 Manhattans / 50 Central Parks worth) that’s ready to be rewilded

The ambition of Mulch is to use these two hidden levers to pull off a moonshot: a delightful, connected, nature-filled New York.

Sequencing

To make progress, the plan has been to create offerings that:

• 1) Reconnect people to nature in a way that fits into their busy lives

• 2) Rewild outdoor space so that achieving 1) becomes easier for other

• 3) Create community and momentum around the vision of a wilder New York

We’re tackling this work in three phases.

Phase One: Rewild existing street space.
Apply a distributed stewardship concept to existing tree pits and street planters. The complexity here comes from the fact that these are public spaces which bring challenges e.g. regulation, water — but still very much doable.

Phase Two: Rewild apartment building terraces and balconies.
This is potentially lower hanging fruit, but the sales cycle is slower. Our offering here is to create a traditional community garden with delivery of custom gardening kits. The value proposition to residents is to reconnect with nature, right from home. The value proposition to building managers is to turn residents into neighbors (and to make your building feel more like a neighborhood).

Phase Three: Create new space to rewild by depaving unnecessary concrete
By de-pave, I mean doing things like installing intensive green roofs and planting street trees for the city. While it requires the most resources, the city’s ambitious Local Laws 92/97 (more on this later) provide a great deal of scope for this work.

Right now our focus is purely on Phase One — rewilding building terraces and balconies.

Phase One: Obstacles / Opportunities

One of my favorite movies is the Martian (tldr: dude gets stuck on Mars. Grows potatoes in his own poop. Returns back to Earth). At the end of the movie, he becomes an astronaut professor and in the closing scene says:

Building Mulch over the past year has sometimes felt like this — you go to sleep having solved one problem, feel excited, and then — boom — wake up to another problem. It’s fun and horrible but mostly fun.

In the past two months, Phase One — a distributed community garden for apartment building terraces and balconies — has gone from idea to a revenue-generating business. Here are some of the open problems that are top of mind:

Making the gardening experience delightful in an urban context

Gardening in New York City is a very different experience than gardening in a suburb where you have a backyard or nearby plot. Even if you have a garden on your terrace, there’s a ton of friction that can make gardening difficult.

Problem: I don’t have space to garden.

In parallel to the building offering, I also had a D2C offering of gardening kits that required users bring their own garden (e.g. claim a tree pit as a garden, or buy a planter box yourself, etc.).

In hindsight, this was not a good idea because finding and preparing a space is actually super annoying. I considered doing an at-home, indoors-only gardening kit — but, since that doesn’t make a dent in re-wilding outdoor space, I decided against it. Instead, in addition to providing gardening kits and community, the focus will be to make sure that folks have a prepared space to actually garden.

Problem: I don’t get enough light

Not having enough light can lead to leggy growth / etiolation (pictured below). I’ve been testing out grow lights, but most are too ugly (long wires, look cheap) and too bright to keep in the living room. Need to keep working on this one.

Problem: I forgot to water

Self-watering solutions are common — will experiment with these in the next cohort. I don’t want to make gardening too convenient — making it completely automatic defeats the aim of feeling connected — but I want to make it easy to stick with.

Problem: Hardening off is inconvenient

“Hardening off” plants is the process of exposing seedlings that have been started indoors to outdoor conditions. Pretty much it means to take your seed tray outside for a few hours, then bring them back in — then repeat the next day for a little longer, etc. It’s annoying even if you have a backyard — if you have to take an elevator up to your rooftop terrace, put your plants out, take an elevator back down, then remember to come back a few hours laters, it’s pretty unrealistic. Still an open problem — maybe I can direct sow in warm months, and do indoors only during the winter season.

Creating a self-sustaining community

Creating authentic community is fascinating and hard. It’s a living and breathing thing — and it’s so easy to do poorly (organize too little and it dissipates, sell too hard and you scare folks away, let in one bad apple in and it can implode, etc.)

For the early part of community building, I spent a lot of time focusing on mechanics — e.g. getting a ton of strangers to meet in-person feels like a stretch, let me organize a Whatsapp; people don’t really check Whatsapp messages, let me pivot to creating mini iMessage group chats, etc.

I think the intention here was right — the venue where people meet matters — but somewhere along the line I de-emphasized probably the most important thing: consistently broadcasting the vision of a nature-filled New York and showing unmistakeable progress towards that goal.

Going forward I want to focus on hammering home the vision of a nature-filled New York — I think if I do that well, the community will take care of itself.

Till next week,
Mayank