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You Need to be Bored
And your weeds can help with that 🌱
Andrea Childress & Martina Potlach
September 09, 2025
Mulch Metrics
Mission: Bring New Yorkers together to rewild NYC
Hello Mulchers! Andrea and Martina here, delivering some rewilding inspo to your inbox! Let’s get to it.
Community Spotlight
We’d love to introduce you to our friends at the Gowanus Canal Conservancy.
GCC seeks to uplift Gowanus into a successful example of how communities can support climate resilience and environmental justice. Their work includes:
💪 grassroots environmental volunteer projects
📖 educating students on climate and sustainability, and
📨 working with elected officials and the community to create, maintain, and support green infrastructure around the Gowanus Canal.
GCC has some great initiatives, volunteer opportunities, reports and local field guides, and other ways to get involved!
“Gowanus Canal Conservancy works to build an equitable, thriving, and resilient urban ecosystem in Gowanus - its waterway, urban forest, parks, and open space - through education, stewardship, and advocacy for our community.”
GCC has lots of volunteer opportunities this fall
Our own Mulcher, Reggie, is the Community Stewardship Manager at GCC! If any of y’all live in the area (or spend a lot of time there), make sure to check out the fall volunteer event interest form in the events section below.
⏱️ The Power of 15 Minutes
The Harvard Business Review recently posted a video talking about how essential it is to be bored. It boiled down to this: when you’re sitting there with nothing to do, your brain has a chance to enter the ✨creative zone✨, which is key for keeping anxiety and depression at bay.
You know what’s boring? Weeding. Aka, removing unwanted plants from an area of ground.
I watched this video on my laptop while scrolling through Instagram on my phone, and it was exactly the reminder I needed to get off my butt and into my little rooftop garden. I’ve been meaning to start prepping my soil for winter sowing, but it’s been so hard to find the motivation.
There’s always a reason why I don’t have time. I have work, I need to meal prep, I need to exercise. But somehow, I manage to find plenty of time every day to mindlessly scroll through my algorithm.
As I sat out in the garden, pulling weeds and being bored, guilt crept in. It seemed like there were more important things I should be doing.
But then I hit the 15 minute mark, and something amazing happened.
The anxiety I felt about my untended garden dissipated as I took care of it. The things I was worried about not doing while weeding? I realized there were still plenty of hours in the day to get them done. I felt remarkably grounded in reality as I tended to the soil.
If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by, well, everything lately, I hope this blurb inspires you to do something rewilding-focused for 15 minutes each day. Maybe you clean up the tree bed outside your home. Maybe you walk through a park. Maybe you give that windowsill planter a little love, even if it’s just staring in awe at the strong little plants growing there for 15 minutes.
Our hope with the Mulch community is to change the way New Yorkers think about their place in this city. Each of you have the power to make an impact on the varied forms of life you encounter each day. 15 minutes of focused caregiving can have such a tremendous impact on your own wellbeing as well as on the community you’re in.
Events
Gowanus Canal Conservancy Fall Volunteer Program
GCC will be kicking off their fall volunteer program starting this week! If you’re interested in assisting with the native plant nursery or with street care & rain garden care throughout Gowanus, make sure to fill out their interest form here!
Tree Counting in Carroll Gardens
Join fellow Mulchers on Tuesday, 9/23 for the Tree Count at Carroll Gardens! You can register here; just make sure to click to the Brooklyn tab to find the event. There are some Saturday tree count events available as well. Let us know on Discord if you sign up for any of the other events, so that we can connect you with other Mulchers!
Inwood Hill Park Autumn Gardening & Wildflower ID
For all our Inwood-based Mulchers, join the park rangers at Inwood Hill Park as they keep the garden blooming into the fall. They’ll be focusing on goldenrod and aster. The event is free and registration is not required. Learn more at the event page here.
That’s it for this week.
Make sure to join the conversation on Discord to share your own rewilding efforts, get tips from the community, and to find events in your area.
See you out there — one garden at a time 🌱 🪴
The Mulch Team