MagpieRhymes

Exactly - several of my favourite and most commonly visited subs are still private. What’s kept me on Reddit for the past few years has been the ability to carefully curate my feed, and the fact I could still access old, desktop Reddit through my phone browser.

As those things disappear, so will I. Reddit is convenient, a one-stop-shop. I can go back to visiting various blogs, news sites and forums.

That looks gorgeous! I saw in another comment that you used a mandolin to slice the apples - you’re braver than I am. I have one, but I’m terrified of it 😅

Hahaha, I’ll think about it (or, more likely, cajole my spouse into doing it for me)

I’m working my way through both the Murderbot Diaries (just started Network Effect) and the Rivers of London series (just finished Broken Homes, though this series is more urban fantasy). Both and very enjoyable!

I’ve only just started (binge-) watching it, and I’m finding it very reminiscent of Lost, though I do think the horror elements are being very well done. I’m a few episodes into season 2, and so far so good!

It’s perhaps not true/hard sci-fi, but I think Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents are, uh, alarmingly prescient, considering she wrote them in the mid-90s and predicted a lot of the societal ills we’re struggling with now (including a fascist politician who promises to ‘make American great again’).

You’ve already gotten advice on preserving, but what about sharing/donating the bounty?

Some cities have public portals where you can post the location of your fruit tree and indicate people can help themselves. There’s also this webpage. And failing that, you could reach out to a local foodbank - they may be able to have volunteers come collect the fruit?

Ontario, Canada/the city of Ottawa subreddit - holy shit, this is the current-top-level comment/thread on a post in the Ottawa subreddit commenting on the wild weather they got yesterday.

If that’s not mainstream collapse awareness, I don’t know what is.

I used to delete my comments regularly, but fell out of the habit a few years ago. I’m currently going through my history manually to overwrite and delete everything - fortunately I wasn’t a prolific commenter, and it’s kind of nice to see my history.

I’ve been gardening now since the first year of the pandemic, and I will absolutely never grow enough to sustain myself. Perhaps on an acreage, if that was my full time job? If I was lucky? But it’s a LOT of work to grow food at a sustainable level, and that’s not even counting how one goes about processing and preserving it, saving seeds for next year, ensuring there’s enough to last till the first harvest next year.

Garden for the pleasure of it, and enjoy those small pleasures. I successfully over-wintered all my strawberries (in Canada! In a raised bed!) and they’re producing like mad this spring. I certainly couldn’t live off them, and perhaps they won’t make it to next year, but I’m enjoying eating the berries right now.

(And you may already know this, but I found that hand-fertilizing the silks was really successful when I grew a small plot of corn!)