April 1, 2025
By Kim Velsey
In April, when everything in Brooklyn is once again blooming and blossoming, native wildflower bouquets grown on Greenpoint rooftop gardens will start arriving at the Coop. Marni Majorelle, a Coop member who runs a landscape design and build company, created the green roofs in 2016 and 2019, using state and city grants, as well as financial support from the buildings’ owner Broadway Stages. After the grants ran out she started Untamed Flowers, a cut flower business to help cover the costs of maintaining the 60,000 square feet of gardens. “I was looking to create a business that supports biodiversity and also make something unique and different—no one else grows native wildflowers on rooftops in industrial North Brooklyn and sells them,” Majorelle said. The bouquets, which include native plants like wild indigo, golden alexanders, wild columbine, mountain mint and a smaller variety of sunflowers, have been sold at the Coop since last year.
We’re part of a community network and we feel like it’s part of the Coop’s mission to support community initiatives.
Untamed Flowers is one of several small, local vendors who work with the Coop and are doing new and interesting things with the city’s ecosystem. Others include Afterlife Ag mushrooms, BK Rot, Greenspace on 4th, Gowanus Nursery and the (no longer very small) Gotham Greens. “We’re part of a community network and we feel like it’s part of the Coop’s mission to support community initiatives,” says produce buyer Cecelia Rembert. Also, things grown and produced in the city’s ecosystem are often unique, exceptionally fresh and due to the small scale of many operations, not available at other stores.
“Small vendors will often come to the Coop because it’s easier to partner with us than to get a toehold in with bigger distributors,” said Rembert. “We have a little more flexibility and bandwidth for managing all the pieces involved. Bigger suppliers are much more systematized, so if your product is unique, it can be hard.”
For examples, the Coop is the only retail store that sells mushrooms from Afterlife Ag, a circular indoor farm that grows mushrooms in a Queens warehouse on compost it collects from restaurant kitchens and then sterilizes. Coop members can buy chestnut mushrooms and pink and yellow oysters. Co-founder Winson Wong noted that one of the big reasons Afterlife works with the Coop is that it doesn’t require individual packaging, which “is better from a waste-management perspective and better for us as a company—it’s a lot of work for us to put everything into 6- or 8-ounce containers.” Afterlife, which also grows other varieties, including blue oyster, lion’s mane and black king, primarily sells its mushrooms to schools, hospitals, and restaurants (they’re delivered in 5 lb. boxes), including Pecking House, Craft, Hav & Mar and Two Boots. Wong added that they’re also still scaling up, but at the moment, demand is not the limiting factor—it’s financing and space, an issue for a lot of local companies that grow or make food in the city.
Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that several of the companies the Coop work with a focus on breaking stuff down—that is, compost. BK Rot, a bike-powered compost and food-hauling service, sells its compost at the Coop. And as of this spring, so will Greenspace on 4th, the native plant community garden between Sackett and Union, which makes “nice compost for a nice price. They do a really good job of balancing the nutrients and sell it in reused mesh coffee bags,” said Rembert.
Working with small, local vendors, however, means that supplies are often limited, seasonal (like the Vermont wreath-maker who incorporated foraged materials into Christmas wreaths) or fleeting. Brooklyn Grange operates rooftop farms in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunset Park, and also rents them out for events. They used to sell at the Coop, but now only sells at farmers’ markets and through their own CSA. Others, like Gotham Greens, have become so big that they’re available not only at the Coop but also at thousands of other grocery stores around the country, although Rembert always tries to stock Gotham’s ugly greens mix, a scrap assortment of loose leaf lettuces, which the Coop sells for $2.58 a bag, and is less widely available than many of their premium varieties.
Sometimes vendors relocate to (literally) greener pastures. Michele Paladino ran Gowanus Nursery, a native plant supplier on the corner of Van Brunt and Carroll Streets, for more than 20 years. She still works with the Coop and does pop-ups in Brooklyn, but she relocated full-time to northwest Connecticut in 2023. “I’m collecting native seed for many of the plants I grow and observing the wild locations they prefer to grow first-hand,” she wrote in email. She still considers herself a New Yorker, she added, and a big part of her decision to leave was more about the grind of running a small business in Brooklyn than her need for more nature. Still, she was thankful “to be able to connect the dots in a more profound way” and to be someplace where “there’s a bounty of protected public lands, and diversity, and wildlife is part of my everyday life.”
Kim Velsey has been a Coop member since 2020. When she’s not writing for the Gazette, she’s a staff writer at New York magazine.