📖 GARDEN STORIES

Hey Crunchy Gardeners! 🌿

We've been trying out some new things around here and wanted to see what you think. We're always experimenting with ways to make this place more useful for gardeners, and we'd love your feedback on what's working and what isn't.

🏠 The Community Portal

We've been working on a community section where gardeners can ask questions and share tips. It's still pretty basic, but we're curious if this is something people would actually use.

What we're trying:

• 🌱 Thread Discussions: You can start conversations about gardening topics
• 🏷️ Tagging: Organize discussions with tags like "zone-10", "pests", "harvest", "seeds"
• 💬 Replies: Build conversations by responding to threads
• 👍 Voting: Help good advice rise to the top
• 👥 Profiles: See other gardeners' interests and connect

We're wondering if this could become a useful place for gardeners to help each other out. What do you think? Would you use something like this?

🎮 A New Look

We've been playing around with a different aesthetic - kind of like a 16-bit garden game. It's definitely experimental, but we thought it might make the site feel more fun and garden-like. What do you think?

🍃 Floating Leaves Animation

• Ambient floating leaves drift across the background
• Different colors and sizes create a peaceful garden atmosphere
• It's like having a gentle breeze through your digital garden

🎵 Audio Experience

We've been experimenting with adding some garden sounds:

• Ambient Sounds: Garden ambience, wind in leaves, bird chirps
• Interaction Sounds: Soil digging, leaf crunching, water drops
• UI Sounds: Button clicks, plant growing effects

It's definitely not for everyone, but some people seem to like it. You can turn it off if it's not your thing.

⌨️ Full Keyboard Navigation

• Ctrl + Enter: Open garden menu
• Arrow Keys: Navigate through options
• Enter/Space: Select current option
• Escape: Close menus
• Navigate the entire site like a 16-bit game!

🌈 The New Color Palette

We've introduced a rich, garden-inspired color system:

• Soil Colors: Rich browns that feel warm and earthy
• Grass Colors: Vibrant greens that pop with life
• Sky Colors: Soft blues that create a peaceful atmosphere
• Flower Colors: A saturated rainbow palette for variety
• Wood & Bark: Natural browns and earth tones

🎯 Other Things We're Trying

Profile Prompts

We've been testing a way to help gardeners connect by asking questions on user profiles. Things like:

• "Describe your dream garden"
• "What are your gardening interests?"
• "What are your sustainability interests?"

We're not sure if this actually helps people connect, but we thought it was worth trying.

Content Moderation

We've added a simple flagging system for the community. Users can flag inappropriate content, and it gets auto-reviewed after a few days. It's pretty basic, but we're hoping it helps keep the community healthy.

Rating System

There's also a rating system for threads and messages. The idea is to help good advice rise to the top, but we're still figuring out if people actually use it.

📸 Garden Album (Early Alpha)

We've been working on a garden album/library feature where you can upload and organize photos of your garden, plants, and harvests. It's still in very early development and currently locked, but if you're interested in testing it out, let us know and we can unlock it for you.

The idea is to help gardeners:

• Document their garden's progress over time
• Share photos with the community
• Create a visual journal of their gardening journey

We're not sure if this is something people would actually use, but we thought it could be fun to try.

🌱 What We're Thinking About

We're always trying new things and seeing what sticks. Some ideas we might explore:

• Seasonal themes that change with the seasons
• Garden progression where users' gardens grow over time
• More audio experiences with additional ambient sounds
• Mobile optimizations for touch-friendly interactions

🎯 Try It Out

These features are live and ready to test:

• Try the community portal: Start a thread about your latest gardening challenge
• Check out the new look: Notice the floating leaves and snail cursor
• Test keyboard navigation: Use Ctrl+Enter to open the garden menu

🌿 Our Approach

We believe in trying things and seeing what works. Sometimes experiments don't work out, and that's okay - we learn from those too. We're comfortable leaving things on the cutting room floor if they don't resonate with people.

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What do you think? Have you tried any of these features yet? We'd love to hear your thoughts on what's working and what isn't. You can share feedback through our feedback form or take our survey to help us decide what to build next.

Thanks for being part of this experiment!

The Crunchy Gardeners 🪴

Mission & Vision

Make it super easy and fun to go green and garden

Values, assumptions, and beliefs

Assumptions and beliefs

1. People want to help others and share
2. Helping people compounds, so that the number of people helped grows exponentially until we’ve indirectly helped everyone, to some degree (pay it forward)
3. Understanding how to be green is hard (without our website)
4. We can efficiently help others by doing hard/technical things that relatively few others can do

Core Values (inviolable, we’ll never make a decision that violates these)

Caring - We want to save people time and energy (even if they can’t pay)

• Aggregating knowledge for stuff people are interested in is useful to them

NonMaximumMinimal Margin - We charge as little as we need to, not as much as we can.

• We don’t devalue our work and do plan on taking care of ourselves, but profit maximization isn’t the goal. We seek the balance between caring for ourselves and others.
• By not being greedy, we can provide more value to customers, creating a sustainable model

Chill Vibe - We’re looking to create a chill job/work environment with fun/exciting projects, not necessarily to make millions of dollars.

• (That said, it would be nice to make some money within the good lifestyle constraints.)

Accidental values (arise spontaneously, not always good)

Deferential - We err on the side of deferring to each other and experts (except about core values). It makes sense to defer to experts (including each other, as we're relative experts in our areas.)

We also tend to defer to whichever of us has a stronger opinion about something.. That seems less sensible, at least when it comes to bigger decisions.

Also, anytime we defer, we should try to "kick the tires" of (think critically about) the decision, rather than automatically deferring.

What exactly do we [think we] do?

We’re building a website for sustainability and gardening enthusiasts to curate and share knowledge and communecommunity [unless we have a better idea of problems to solve].

Strategy

(Question 4, How will we succeed? intentional decisions that differentiate us vs our competition)

Trustworthy because of AI enhancements, crowdsourcing (social capital), trust systems, etc.

Build what you want to build (do what you want to do) Why build these cities glorious, if man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows. -E. Markham

• We lean in heavily on things we want to learn/experiment/develop and the cross section between that practical use cases
  • This feeds the builder and provides motivation/passion
• Because we don’t really know what we’re building anyway, the cost of building it twice is outweighed by the gain

Experimental by Design

• We deploy small features with an iterative mindset
• Momentum builds from success
• Constraints of time
• Need to be comfortable at an early stage leaving the entire project on the cutting room floor

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Fundraising Strategy

• We’re not planning on fundraising:
  • Rationale: keep ourselves on our tempo and not beholden to investors

Exit Strategy

• We’re not planning on exiting
  • Rationale:
    • we can do it better than whomever we sell to
    • we can be more responsible with governance
      • case study: Mint selling to Intuit, and Intuit pumping and dumping for users
        • etc.

Equity Sharing

For equity, something proportional:

e.g. if one were to do 4 hours of UI/UX, and we combined did 96 hours of coding, it would be a 4% share (could be weighted based on salary: talk about it explicitly if so. Otherwise assume equal weightings per hour worked),

The shares would be dilutable (i.e. as people do more next year, they would also gain shares and decrease our percentage), but I think it's reasonable/fair that early participants get a higher weighting (maybe on a yearly basis?) as the risk of earlier projects is higher.

That being said, there is probably a 90% or higher this project goes nowhere.

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Reference

Crunchy Garden- Stakeholder Interviews

Initial thoughts from Crunchy Garden Website Journey Log

• Blog idea: think in public. Use the blog as the first version of the website
• community
  • research learn about communities for eco products and sustainability
  • random idea:
    • can we use chatgpt + user context to generate ecofriendly product recommendations
      • i.e. crunchy green chatbot
• First development work
  • GA4 (do it for all of our sites)
• Bob is adding 2 solo development hours per week
• Seems fine to spend $200/month (maybe more) on development/learning costs i.e. AWS compute
• Interested in trying out new technologies/ways of working
  • SST - Serverless stack, used at Vital, scales well, Infrastructure as Code
  • Next.js (via SST template, OpenNext)
  • AI tools/processes
• Will provide good fodder for resumes/interviews/Meetup talks
• Can justify spending time learning this stuff, vs. Vital work where actual coding takes precedence
• Not super concerned about monetary results - possible risk

Keep in mind:

• AI tools provide many new opportunities; don’t just do things in the old way
• Anything rote/routine can probably be automated fairly easily with AI help

Patrick Lencioni’s Six Critical Questions

Things to be clear on, and for executive teams to have on an index card after every meeting

1. Why do we exist?

Mission - what difference the organization seeks to make in the world

2. How do we behave? (See “Understand the Different Types of Values” on page 2 of Make Your Values Mean Something, an article by Lencioni)

• 1, 2, or 3 Core values (inviolable, we’ll never make a decision that violates these)
  • Aspirational values (we don’t reflect these yet, but we want to)
  • Permission-to-play values (minimum behavioral/social standards, common across orgs, e.g. Integrity, Honesty, the “No Assholes” rule)
  • Accidental values (arise spontaneously, things like common interests or personalities, e.g. Niceness, Millennial, Cat Lovers)
    • Can be good: people who share something feel a sense of inclusion, belonging
    • Can be bad:
      • people who don’t can feel excluded, which makes sense for core values but not for these
      • may create a brand/reputation you don’t want

3. What exactly do we [think we] do? (1-sentence factual description, minimal adjectives/adverbs)

4. How will we succeed? (strategy - intentional decisions that differentiate us vs our competition)

5. What is most important now? (rallying cry that all teams align toward for the next 3-6 months; maybe 12-18 months for very slow-moving organizations)

• “Thematic goal”, temporary in nature
• Doesn’t always have to be achieved to move onto next goal
• Made concrete by supporting objectives
• Trumps other goals (“sustaining goals”?); this clarity is vital when weighing tradeoffs between two goals

6. Who on the team must do what? (specific action items for each member of the leadership team)

• Be clear on this at the end of every meeting
• Addendum:
  • Hypothesis: You can be good to others, good to yourself, and not broke. (i.e. chill vibe, i.e. Aaron’s volunteer dad steps back and life is okay.

Crunchy Garden needs your help!

We're a small group of gardening and sustainability enthusiasts building this site in our free time, and we want to understand how we can best help people on their gardening and sustainability journey.

Can you take 5 minutes (or less) to complete this survey?

If the link above isn't working for you, here's the full URL: https://qualtricsxmwm57n5z55.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bpZVvVniMcO9zeu

At the end, there'll be a place to enter your email if you're interested in providing more detailed feedback.

Thank you so much for your support!

Love,

The Crunchy Gardeners 🪴

TLDR: Chip Drop is a great place to get free wood chips if you're cheap and not too picky.

I am absolutely stoked to announce our affiliation with Chip Drop (when you sign up for Chip Drop, we make 40 cents, potentially more if you're from California). But let's back up the story a bit here:

I first heard about Chip Drop years ago when my buddy, Aaron, shared this video for lolz:

The gist is simple: arborists dump their wood chips in your yard because it'll be easier for them to deliver it (instead of driving further to a dump).

We're both big gardening nerds, although I'm probably the bigger cheapskate. From a consumer perspective, there is no better deal than free, for wood chips.

4 successful chip drops later, I'm a huge fan!

From the tech perspective, I'm absolutely in love with this site idea. Use technology to make things more efficient and have everyone (including the planet) win.

When I reached out to Chip Drop, Bryan was kind enough to give us some encouraging words on our Crunchy Garden site (:prayer-emoji:), and take us on as an affiliate!

So yeah, if you want free wood chips click on our affiliate link and sign up for chip drop Chip Drop Link

Comments? Email us at info@crunchy.garden

Happy mulching!

Meow

We have to start somewhere to build this super amazing website, right? The same thing goes for your garden! I wanted to share a link to a site called Seeds Now, where I like to buy my seeds. Seeds Now products are Organic and Non-Gmo, which is what pushes me in this direction.

I usually tend to wait until there is a deep sale, (typically, they have items available for 50% off). I'll use my beet coins, the Seeds Now rewards points, to help me get free shipping, or wait until there is a free shipping sale. Here is the link: SeedsNow.com. Note: this is an affiliate link (we make a commission off orders through this link). Crunchy Garden uses affiliate links to get paid (💰), but we consciously try to be objective with the information and reviews we share.

Have somewhere else you like to get seeds and other plants? We'd love to hear from you! Email us at info@pickakit.com (NOTE: gotta change this email to crunchy garden once we make one.)

Crunchy Garden is a place where environmentally conscious consumers and gardeners can join to trade knowledge.

Our Mission Make decisions super easy for finding eco-friendly and gardening products.

We have a lot of ideas, but aren't super committed to any given direction yet. We plan to play around with building different stuff, to see what is helpful to people. Feel free to email us at info@pickakit.com (NOTE: make a crunchy garden email later) if you have any thoughts.

So one thought I had, when washing my mom's car last night, was that car covers are a good product to keep things clean, but what are the environmental impacts? It would be great to find car covers that are eco friendly.

I think this can expand to the general case of curating ecofriendly car products. How do we determine if things are harmful for the environment? Chat GPT 3.5 has an answer:

Assessing the environmental impacts of car covers and other car products is essential to make informed eco-friendly choices. Here are some considerations and steps you can take to determine if a product is harmful to the environment:

• Material Composition: Start by examining the materials used in the car cover or product. Look for eco-friendly materials like organic cotton, hemp, or recycled fibers. Avoid products made from petroleum-based plastics or other non-biodegradable materials.
• Biodegradability: Check whether the car cover is biodegradable or compostable. Eco-friendly products should break down naturally over time without leaving harmful residues.
• Chemical Use: Investigate if any harmful chemicals are used in the production of the product. Harmful chemicals can have negative effects on ecosystems and human health. Look for products labeled as "chemical-free" or "non-toxic."
• Sustainable Production: Consider the manufacturing process. Sustainable production methods aim to minimize resource use, energy consumption, and waste generation. Look for products from companies with a commitment to sustainable practices.
• Packaging: Assess the packaging of the product. Environmentally friendly products often come in minimal or recyclable packaging.
• Certifications: Look for third-party certifications that indicate a product's eco-friendliness. Examples include the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), OEKO-TEX Standard 100, and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification.
• Product Lifespan: Evaluate the durability and lifespan of the product. Eco-friendly products should be long-lasting to reduce the need for frequent replacements.
• Waste Management: Consider how the product is disposed of after use. If the product has reached the end of its life, can it be recycled or upcycled? Avoid products that contribute to landfill waste.
• User Reviews and Recommendations: Look for reviews and recommendations from other consumers or environmental organizations. People who have used the product may provide valuable insights into its environmental impact.
• Energy Efficiency: For electronic car accessories, check their energy efficiency ratings. Opt for products that consume less power or have energy-saving features.
• Local Manufacturing: Consider products that are locally manufactured to reduce transportation-related carbon emissions.
• Usefulness and Necessity: Finally, evaluate whether the product is essential and will be used regularly. Avoid unnecessary purchases that lead to more consumption and waste.

By taking these factors into account, you can make more informed decisions when selecting eco-friendly car products, including car covers, and contribute to a more sustainable and environmentally responsible future.

One of the top reddit coments on this car cover thread suggested building a gazebo with tarps.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.