Author: Karen GoatKeeper

Karen GoatKeeper loves to write. Her books include picture books, novels and nonfiction for science activity books and nature books. A recent inclusion are science teaching units.
The coming year has goals for two new novels, a picture book and some books of personal essays. This is ambitious and ignores time constraints.
She lives in the Missouri Ozarks with her small herd of Nubian dairy goats. The Ozarks provides the inspiration and setting for most of her books.

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Latest From High Reaches

Meet My Opal Goat

For the last five years I’ve kept my intention to keep no kids, to let my herd gradually dwindle away. Meet my Opal goat and broken intention.

Why Not Keep Kids?

Goats live twelve to fourteen years, usually. Mine are as much pets, family, as livestock and I have no family interested in giving them a home.Over the years I’ve found, even those people with the best intentions, often can’t provide a permanent home for a bunch of spoiled brats.

As I’ve grown older, even become old (much as I hate to admit it), the question of what is to happen to my girls has become important. It was better to stop adding to the herd and plan on outliving them.

Other Considerations

Jennifer, my first goat, was born in June, 1974. Forty-nine years is a long time to be a goat keeper. This is doubly so when they are dairy goats requiring attention twice a day, every day, regardless of weather or health or other activities.

For some years I had someone to milk for me over a weekend or, once, a real vacation. There has been no one now for twelve years.

I do need to take that back a little. I do know someone now who will try to do chores for me now and then. The herd does not agree. They rarely see anyone but me and consider all other people something to flee. It’s hard to milk goats hiding out on the hills.

My Opal goat, Nubian doe
My new Nubian doe High Reaches Drucilla’s Opal is sweet and friendly most of the time. Like all goats she can be ornery, curious and get into all kinds of situations around the barn and out on the hills.

Meet my Opal goat

High Reaches Drucilla had a single doe kid this year. The kid adopted me as well as her mother. I was glad when the person who bought the other doe kid didn’t want her.

Guilt set in. I can barely keep up with chores now. How could I propose to care for Opal for another ten plus years?

Writing came to the rescue. I really enjoyed doing “The Little Spider” and wanted another such project. Opal and Agate (from “Capri Capers”) will hopefully become partners in crime, adventure and more in an easy reading series.

And Opal gets to stay.

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Tall Bull Thistles

Most people mow over thistles, spray them, dig them out, eradicate them. We let several of these tall bull thistles grow each year.

These plants are biennials. In late summer thistle rosettes appear in various places around the yard. We note where they are and pick out a few to avoid with the mower.

Lots of Thistles

There are invasive thistles. Musk thistle is found in this area. Their flowers are a gorgeous color, but the plants are definitely unfriendly. We’ve never had them here.

Tall thistles do grow in the pastures. These native thistles have few spines and are the earliest to bloom.

Bull thistles are the ones that showed up in the yard. They are also native. Unfortunately they do have spines.

There are others, but those are the most common around here.

tall bull thistles attract hummingbirds
The bull thistles are near the line of hummingbird feeders. These birds swoop over to check out the thistle blooms on their way to and from the feeders. The flowers are only popular in the morning with both the hummingbirds and insects, so they must release nectar only then. The seed heads are visited off and on all day.

Why Let Thistles Grow?

If you check the labels on bird seed, many mixtures have thistle seed in them. Birds, especially goldfinches love thistle seed. These golden birds feed their young the seed and line their nests with the downy comas.

The value of tall bull thistles goes beyond this. The flowers attract lots of bees, bumblebees, wasps, butterflies and hummingbirds. Since each flower is actually a cluster of many flowers and each has plenty of nectar, the flowers are very popular.

Amazing Plants

Normally these plants grow about four feet tall with many branches. Not this year. This year our tall bull thistles topped out about eight to ten feet. We had to prop them up against the wind.

These are late bloomers so we watched as the stems got taller and taller. Finally they put out branches with buds on the tips.

Other, smaller plants were already blooming. Goldfinches abandoned the bird feeder to hang on the thistle branches and gorge on thistle seed.

Now the tall bull thistles are in full bloom. The hummingbirds make daily forays. Soon the goldfinches will mob them.

And next year more will grow.

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GKP Writing News

Finishing The Little Spider

Putting ‘The End’ on a book is always exciting and a relief. This is especially true for a book that has taken years. Finishing “The Little Spider” is one of those.

I wrote the text draft years ago. That was the easy part. Picture books require illustrations. That was the hard part.

Getting Picture Book Illustrations

When the text got written, I did no drawing. I wrote. Period.

So I talked to several people who did draw. No one was willing to take this project on. So the text sat on my computer, moved to two new computers, waited.

Then I ended up doing the illustrations for “For Love of Goats”. Finding anyone else was not really an option as I wanted good illustrations for half a dozen different breeds of goats. They may all be goats, but they don’t look alike. It’s like both an Arabian and a Quarter Horse are both horses, but they don’t look exactly alike.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
One advantage of doing my own illustrations is getting the ones I want, the ones I’ve pictured in my mind as fitting the story. This was certainly true in “For Love of Goats”, my book of tongue twisters, alliterative stories, short fiction and memories of goats and goatkeeping. I’m glad I can do the illustrations well enough for publishing, an important consideration.

Gaining Confidence

After finding I could really do the illustrations, I got brave. I tackled the illustrations for “Waiting for Fairies”. The different animals weren’t that hard. People are hard to draw. I’m glad little children are so forgiving about illustrations.

So now I’m finishing “The Little Spider” illustrations. Actually all of them are done now. There are two things left.

One is a border for the last page about spider ballooning, the topic of the story. I could leave the text on its own, but a little border of the little spider running around the text would be fun.

What should I put on the cover? Obviously, the little spider goes on the cover. I haven’t decided what the spider will be doing or how the title and author name will go around it.

The Final Steps

Once I have those two things done, I can start the process of getting the book printed. Although there will be eBook versions, the conversions seem to distort the images. I don’t know how to fix this problem.

One thing is certain. Finishing “The Little Spider” will open up some writing time. Of course that is already filled with three other projects.

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Resident Fawn

Deer are not uncommon out here in our valley. They can be a nuisance. Still, our resident fawn is welcome.

Why are fawns near houses and barns?

There is a small herd of doe deer frequenting the backyard. They tend to have their fawns and keep these little ones on the hillsides close to the yard.

Coyotes live back up the ravines and will attack fawns. These predators tend to stay away from the areas near our house and barn even though we don’t have a dog and don’t shoot them.

The doe deer seem to think their offspring will stay safer near our yard. That might be the reason one doe had her twins out in the small buck pasture.

Left Behind

Fawns get parked for hours at a time. Their mothers come by to feed them now and then, but stay away otherwise. The small buck pasture has tall grass and weeds making it easy to hide small fawns.

One day the fawns got big enough to stay with the doe. One left with her. The other stayed in the pasture to become our resident fawn.

resident fawn
The resident fawn is a wild white-tailed fawn. It still has spots. All day it stays down in the grass and is invisible. It gets up in the late afternoon and is still up in the early morning. When lots of cars or big trucks go by, the fawn drops down into the grass. Later its ears are visible as it checks if the coast is clear again.

Turning the Fawn Loose

Several times we watched as the doe came back to feed her fawn. Each time it followed along the fence, but wouldn’t try to jump out.

So I locked my herd in the barn lot for the night and left the pasture gate open. The resident fawn seemed to be gone. I even saw it outside the pasture along the creek, at least, I think it was that one.

Watching the Resident Fawn Grow Up

A red pickup stopped, backed up and stopped by the house. “You have a fawn trapped in your pasture!”

Sure, enough, the fawn was out running along the far fence. After reassuring the people we would take care of the matter, they left. And we sat down to watch.

Augustus and the fawn have a relationship going. They aren’t really friends. But the fawn tags along as the two graze in the pasture. Both are happy.

How long will the resident fawn stay? Augustus hopes it will be a long time. We don’t know.

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GKP Writing News

Garden Spider Watching

Two big tubs sit near the back porch. Each contains a tomato plant. Besides picking cherry tomatoes to eat, we get to do some garden spider watching.

These black and yellow zipper spiders are not as common as they were years ago. The changing weather patterns might be the reason with late frosts and droughts. That makes it special to have such a beauty right outside the back door.

Another reason this is special is my work on “The Little Spider” picture book. The spiderling grows up into a big black and yellow beauty.

"The Little Spider" is a picture book by Karen GoatKeeper and will be published in Fall, 2023.
“The Little Spider” is a picture book by Karen GoatKeeper and will be published in Fall, 2023.

Orb Weaving Spiders

Late summer into fall is a good time to spot these architectural masters. They hatch out in the spring, but stay small and inconspicuous until now.

Summer is insect bonanza time and these small spiders start growing into big adults. We’ve seen this garden spider watching as ours doubled in size in a couple of weeks.

Every morning this female spider spins a new web. Knowing the spider is nearly blind, seeing only light and shadow, and spins this large web only by feel makes it even more amazing.

garden spider watching
Spiders are amazing creatures. Watching one spin a web is fascinating. They eat lots of insects and these never get immune as they do to insecticides that poison more than the insects. This zipper garden spider will produce an egg case soon.

Patient Hunters

All day the spider hangs mead downwards on the zipper in the center of her web. The big spiders are all females.

A male came to call last week. He is a quarter of the size of the female. He spun a little web close to hers and carefully courted her until she invited him to call.

The male is gone, escaped safely to court another spider somewhere else. The female is now trying to put on a lot of size and weight. Her web is bigger with more stickly strands.

The nearby rain barrels catch various insects. We turn wasps, bees and the like loose. However, Japanese beetles and grasshoppers get tossed into the spider web.

The spider pounces, backs off a minute or so, moves back in and wraps ther catch up in silk. About five minutes later, she moves in for a meal.

End of Summer

In time the spider will spin an egg cocoon. When frost comes, she will die. That will bring an end to this year’s garden spider watching. Maybe one of her spiderlings will stay so we can do the same next year.    

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Square Hay Bales

Almost everyone puts up round bales now. That makes finding square hay bales difficult.

Round bales have advantages. Since they are moved by tractor, no hay crew is needed. They shed rain and can be left outside.

These big bales have one major flaw for me. They are too big to move without equipment I don’t have. Square hay bales are manageable for me. And, with a small herd of wasteful goats, they waste less as less is put out at a time.

My Hay

For years I bought my hay. Now I have people come and custom bale my fields. For a bit more they even put it in my barn for me.

Watching someone else put hay in my barn is hard. I picked up, unloaded, and stacked my own hay for decades. Age catches up with everyone and moving hay is one of my casualties.

Even harder is trying to explain how I want the hay bales stacked. My ancient barn is difficult to stack in. The stacks fit best in one way. And that way makes getting them back out easier too.

square hay bales being made
The tractor growls its way across the field as the claws rake in dry windrow grasses. The baler clunks and chugs pressing the grasses into bales, wraps them in twine and drops them onto the field. This is a urprisingly fast operation as dry grass becomes square hay bales.

Will My Goats Eat the Hay?

I can’t answer this question. The herd goes out and eats the grass plus weed assortment out in the fields. That doesn’t mean they will eat the same stuff dried.

Every fall this turns into a debate. I put hay out in the troughs. The goats check it out. They go out and scrounge in the fields.

Winter sets in. The fields are unavailable due to rain or ice or snow. Suddenly the hay tastes good to the goats.

Winter is coming. The first taste of fall with warm days and cool nights has set in giving warning. The goats may not be impressed with stacks of square hay bales in the barn while the fields are still green and lush.

I am.

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GKP Writing News

Chemistry Teaching Units

It’s August. Many homeschool people are busy choosing chemistry teaching units for this upcoming school year. And mine aren’t available yet.

The City Water Project teaching units are up on Teachers Pay Teachers. These are fun during the summer. Some of the Investigations and Activities can be done inside, but water rockets are definitely an outside activity.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
Title pages are both challenging and fun to create. For the teaching units I try to keep them simple.

Setting Up Chemistry Teaching Units

My science activity books have several parts. One part has the Investigations and Activities. These are somewhat similar. The first are more like lab work. The latter can be fun stuff.

Another part is composed of pencil puzzles like word searches, deduction problems, quote puzzles, coloring pages. I devise all of these myself and have found doing them for chemistry challenging.

Chem Notes are scattered throughout the unit. These are information/trivia sentences. For chemistry, many are related to the history of chemistry.

Each unit contains a story. For the unit on matter, the story is about flour as flour is used for two Activities. The solutions unit will have a story about making pottery as the clay is a mixture.

These Take Time

I’ll admit it. I’ve been working on the Little Spider illustrations when I should be working on chemistry.

I thought my time would stretch for both. It doesn’t. Each illustration is complex and takes far longer than I anticipated.

Each chemistry teaching unit takes time too. Several are set up. Most need the Chem Story finished. All need the Chem Notes. And I need to redo a few Investigations.

Everything Will Get Done

I keep telling myself exactly this. It is true. If I keep working on one illustration a day, “The Little Spider” will be done in just over three weeks from now.

And the chemistry teaching units will be put up on Teachers Pay Teachers. The first one needs some Chem Notes to finish it.

Is it on chemistry? Sort of. It’s on the metric system, using a scale and significant figures. These are important concepts for the rest of the units.

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GKP Writing News

Creating Picture Book Pages

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

watercolor image of little spider begins creating picture book pages
My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

adding background while creating picture book pages
For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

adding text for creating picture book pages
In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.

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My Cucurbit Year

Somehow my garden is having a cucurbit year. I don’t think I planned it this way. It just happened.

I like growing and eating squash, melons, pumpkins and an occasional cucumber. My goats love the squash and pumpkins too. The chickens prefer melons.

Beginning Squash Plans

butternut squash for my cucurbit year
This year I planted the butternut squash so it would grow up over the shade house cattle panel arch. It worked fairly well. I do have to check every day for new shoots trying to spread out across the ground. The squash are not too big for the vines to support them hanging. Some do get caught on the wire and have to be moved off.

Summer squash is a popular item. So I planned a bed for my favorite zephyrs. Three hills with three plants per hill. I plan ahead for losses due to squash bugs and borers.

These are supposed to be semibush. Not this year. This year robust vines five and six feet long wander out across garden paths and other garden beds.

Winter butternut squash was slated to cover half of the shade house. It didn’t listen. These vines took up their half and we are having an ongoing battle over the shade house interior plus the lima bean section and a couple of garden paths.

The usual monster squash, a goat favorite, went into a large 30 foot square bed by itself. Vines now fill this bed, climb up the six foot fences around the bed and try to invade the yard. Leaves tower four feet over the ground.

monster squash for my cucurbit year
This is still an unknown squash variety. The vines are tremendous, spreading out sixty feet, if they can. The leaves are over a foot across. Mature squash can be over 12 pounds. The goats love this squash. It keeps for months once its shelled.

Unplanned Cucurbits

My long beans didn’t come up for some reason this year. In a lapse of sense I put in three pie pumpkin seeds. These are happily taking over the front corner of the garden.

Another winter squash, Yuxi, went in when the winter melon seeds didn’t germinate. These monster vines are flowing up along one garden fence and trying to invade the tomatoes next door.

Although planned, the royal watermelon has in past years been very small. Compared to the nearby monster squash, it is still small. But the vines are running amok across a front section by the water barrels.

Cucurbit Year Invasion

At least a third of my garden is now buried under cucurbit vines. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the leaves weren’t so big.

Although I have only an inkling of how many monster squash are hiding under those leaves, judging from the butternut crop, this cucurbit year in the garden means we will be eating a lot of squash this winter as well as this summer.

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GKP Writing News

“The Last Train From Hiroshima” Book Review

The world and war changed on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time. If all you know about that day and August 9, 1945, is that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the cities, killed thousands of people and ended World War II, you are the victim of the spin doctors. “The Last Train From Hiroshima” by Charles Pellegrino tells the stories of the survivors and victims of both sides relating what really happened.

History, real history, is more than names, dates and heroic deeds. It is littered with people and events that make you feel uncomfortable. Yet, if that history is white washed, it will happen again. The purpose of looking at history is to learn from the mistakes and decisions of the past. And, as many have known for years, people can learn more from their mistakes than their successes.

Story of Hiroshima

Why do we learn so little about what actually happened on those days? General MacArthur laid out his Protocol forbidding survivors from talking about what happened. He curtailed any scientific research about it. He confiscated and classified written information about it. Then he and the Japanese government put out their sanitized versions.

John Hershey managed to gather and publish some of what did happen. His book, “Hiroshima” follows six survivors on that day and for some days afterwards. Dr. Paul Takashi Nagai published “The Bells of Nagasaki”, the story of his survival and the efforts of the University medical school personel and became the focus of a smear campaign.

Atomic Bomb Trivia

Did you know the Hiroshima bomb was a dud? Only around 10% of it exploded.

How does an atomic bomb explode? It isn’t one explosion, but a series of waves each carrying its own type of destruction.

How many people died? No one knows or will ever know.

Why did some people survive even though they were close to the explosion? Some of the Hiroshima survivors took that Last Train from Hiroshima just in time for the second bomb and survived that one too.

And the second bomb didn’t explode over Nagasaki, but its suburb Urikami, just over a little hill. This made it easy to hide the true effects of the second bomb which was a plutonium bomb, not an atom bomb and three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Yet, this bomb has been relegated to little more than a sentence or two in the history books.

Aftermath

Few people knew about the effects of radiation. People without a scratch on them would sicken and die days, weeks or years later as speculation about what was wrong proliferated. These effects too were mostly hidden from the public.

Some older survivors of one or both bombs lived long lives advocating for peace. They had lived through hell and didn’t want anyone else to have to. Masahiro Sasaki summed it up this way: “It’s been more than sixty years since the bombs were dropped. God made everyone equal. So, I forgot who dropped the bomb. What I am trying to say is that it does not matter who dropped the bomb. It’s not an issue. It should never be an issue for any country. It’s an issue for all humanity.

“The important thing is that I, and Sadako (his sister who folded paper cranes as she was dying cancer caused by radiation), knew the feeling of Omiyari (In your heart, always think about the other person before yourself.) – and if this principle can be taken to heart and passed down by just a few of you here in this room today, it may, in time, lessen the dangers in the world.”

This is an excellently written book. It is objective, not dwelling on gory details. That does not make this an easy book to read.

My ratings and book reviews of both “Last Train from Hiroshima” and “The Bells of Nagasaki” are on Goodreads.