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New varient we might not be immune to. Nice!!! Sounds like Corona has mutated to ignore the current vaccines, and we will be at square one again.



Welp, I could use some more Work From Home time and stimmy monies.

It may have enough spike changes to evade the antibodies originally made by the vaccines. That would mean more vaccinated people could get infections. But the vaccines did two things that are going to fight any variant:

1. They made activated T and B-cells that respond to much wider viral epitopes than antibodies. When those T-cells encounter any corona virus (including SARS1 or MERS) they quickly get B-cells cranking out antibodies specific to that new variant. So the race between the virus and the immune system is fixed way in favor of the immune system.

2. If your immune system has a couple of months following vaccination, some "antibody evolution" takes place in the lymph nodes and other germinal centers. You start making all sorts of related, but different, antibodies. Pretty much antibodies against every variant possible. Evolution has selected for us making those related antibodies, just to keep up with virus mutation. That's called "co-evolution" and it's a very real thing.

What we should be looking for is how many vaccinated South Africans are ending up seriously ill or dead. The hospitalized number is not very useful in a country with so many poor people and lots of AIDS patients. Too many rich people get hospitalized when they don't need it, and way too many poor people have to just die at home. But eventually, a more deadly variant may emerge. The vaccinated or previously infected will do well. Non-immune people will die at a much higher rate.

Makes sense. Thanks PIA.

Big day today, I'm ready to sit down. Got up early, made coffee, and spent too long posting on RR; made Saturday morning hashbrowns and baked bacon; drafted and estimated a roof to span the space between two shipping containers for more forkliftable storage; went to the hardware store for parts to make a heavy duty extension cord for working at the cabin; stopped by my buddy's bicycle shop to pick up my electric bike that I took in for a tune-up and tires seven years ago; took all the screens off and washed the house windows, then cleaned and installed the winter storms; took the bike for a test ride (you never forget how to ride); shopped online for a couple of special tools; and put together a fresh Johnson-Su compost batch (leaves, litter from the chicken house, and biochar) - one with a big food waste hole in the middle for the worms to eat.

Time for a gin and tonic and a few more pages of Finding The Mother Tree. Later we'll walk downtown for the community lighted Christmas parade.

Just curious: How long do you have to let a chicken manure-based compost heap cook? I've heard of a lot of folks frying their plants with chicken poop compost because the nitrogen content is so high. That always seemed to me a reason to use less in your heap than you would something more benign like cow pies, but I've read some treatises about letting it brew longer.

Still have not got our chicken coop assembled yet, but coop litter is immanent.

I confess I'm not an expert on conventional composting, which is accelerated and bacteria dominant. I do know that adding biochar will improve the process and adsorb nitrogen, among other things, to be made available over the longer term. Such compost is generally considered to be a nutrient input to soils.

The Johnson-Su reactor is a static pile device that allows the compost to mature for a year, which allows it to become fungal dominant, and the extended period fully breaks everything down. The end product is soil health improving, microbially rich inoculant, and is not considered so much as a nutrient input.

That said, our chicken litter is probably less than 10% poop and 90% hay and straw. I'd guess that ratio, especially when mixed with other biomass and composted, sufficiently dilutes the potency of the manure to make it easily usable without concern.

Later we did walk, and saw the parade - all 14 minutes of it! It was the stuff of a wonderful short story about a tiny, not very wealthy community doing its best to keep up a non-virtual existence in an era of CGI. It was pretty pathetic, but oddly inspiring. Got in a nice brisk walk.

I have read your lynx which are informative re fungal dominance, and I have dribbled in compost tea to fight fuksarium fungus. I was trying for a bacterial biofilm to fill possible fungal niches, so I goosed my compost tea in an a large plastic trash can, with some sugar, spiked with PO4 and NH3 of some kind, and infected it with Actinomate, Actinomyces refs.. It worked , but learned other workarounds. I'm reconsidering it after this fungal year, that I read about somewhere. I,m trying for a more bacteria dominance, but what could go worng?

So, that's why I am cautious about adding an unknown fungus rich compost to my beds. Of course, I can see both sides of it, but I dont want to risk all of next years crop, which would be worst case scenario... no that would have been the year when I burned everything with a hotter than expected mix of chicken and mushroom poops not quite composted!

TAT

I have cut tree branches in the bottom of one raised bed (Hugelkultur), and that's the bed where my summer squash all perished by fungus. So I'm thinking I should remove the wood, and just add some perlite to help the soil retain moisture instead. We are in a high fire danger zone, so any burning of green waste is illegal: I'm not making any biochar in the foreseeable future.

Same difference.