Zach WeinersmithOK, this convinced me I should be here more: https://bsky.app/profile/dubikan.bsky.social/post/3mi5ncilczk23
How's it going?
katfeete@ZachWeinersmith Dealing with the existential stress of the ongoing Everything by planting *entirely* too many tomatoes. How are you?
@katfeete Same but fruit trees. Actually it's been a very stressful few years, mostly due to writing more books and it being harder to make money on comics. But, overall, really not bad.
@ZachWeinersmith Feels like everything small business has gotten harder and more stressful these past few years :-/
Thank god for gardens being magical stress-eaters. I haven’t done much with fruit trees yet, but I have Plans.
@katfeete For me it's been... complex? Books have been selling pretty decent and I have a bunch more book releases lined up. What I miss is the epoch where you just put stuff online and people went to your website!
@katfeete Btw, if it's any help, I switched from buying grafted trees to rootstock. Planning to learn grafting this winter. If it works it's wildly cheaper. Like, rootstock+scionwood runs you between 7 and 20 dollars, whereas full trees are like 30-100 dollars. Plus, you get to watch the whole process, pick the rootstock for your area, and access weiiiiiiird scionwood. At least, that's the theory!
@katfeete One other thing I wished I'd learned earlier is that potted plants are almost always a bad way to get trees. Typically they're leftover stock that's highly rootboound, so you have to beat the hell out of the roots to fix their shape. And by the time you're done you haven't gained any time over just planting bare roots, which tend to be cheaper.
@ZachWeinersmith Oh man I want to learn to graft so bad — aside from the expense of trees, I have an elderly (maybe 100 yo?) apple tree out back that’s dying; really wanna take cuttings so it can have clone babies before we loose it entirely.
I have had decent luck with bareroot and there’s a very good nursery called Edible Landscaping in day trip range that’s about the only place I will buy live plants but grafting would be so amazing. Gotta find the time for a class dang it!
@katfeete Oh, I love Edible Landscaping!
@ZachWeinersmith Yeah my family’s business used to be able to rely on distributors. Now we’re pretty much having to be salesmen, make deals, run our own retail operation, etc. It’s not unworkable, we’re still selling decent, I’m grateful, but… everything is, well. More complex.
In certain ways I’m glad my comic never made money, because current capitalism and creativity are a hard mix. But also hard to put as much as I want into my personal creative projects because they make no money…. 🤷♀️