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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GKP Writing News

On Library Shelves

February is Black history month. Since Missouri is joining the rush to ban books by Black authors, I’m trying to read a few before they are yanked from the library shelves.

The local library is one of the main reasons we moved here. It has moved to a new, bigger facility, added DVDs, audio books and eBooks. It is part of a consortium of Missouri libraries so the range of materials available is huge.

Librarians and Books

This is a conservative town. When the librarians add books to the library shelves, they take this into consideration. The idea is to have books people want to check out to read.

Browsing down the aisles I see lots of mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction and romances. Westerns have their own section. The nonfiction area has books on religion, gardening, pets and livestock.

There are others, if you search. “I Am Malala” is there in the biography section along with John Wayne.

Young Adult Section

If the legislature has its way, this is where the purge will focus. “The Hate You Give” and “On the Come Up” are there along with books on suicide prevention, drugs and gender.

Such subjects might disturb some readers. The legislature wants to take them off the library shelves, burn them, make sure even those who want that information can’t see it.

That leaves those wanting information listening to people on the streets who may or may not know anything. It leaves people ignorant.

Perhaps that is the purpose. Controlling what is on library shelves controls what people know so they can be fed anything and have no way to know what is true and what isn’t. We deserve better. We deserve encouraging knowledge about our past and ourselves.

In the meantime, I will go back to my latest book “You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey” by two Black sisters, Amber and Lacey Ruffin, about some of the crazy things said to and done to Black people often in ignorance of how a Black person would perceive it.

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Reading Gardening Books

The weather is so inviting, warm and moist, perfect for gardening. It’s still February. So I’ve gotten out and am reading gardening books.

Some I own and keep on my book shelves like “Grow Your Own Chinese Vegetables”, “Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening” and The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book. These are now mostly for reference and refreshing the memory.

Others are from the library. Each spring these come off their shelves and get displayed on a table to tempt gardeners like me.

reading gardening books gives container ideas
Peppers tend to cross with each other. The most infamous are hot and sweet peppers so the fruits are cooler or hotter than expected. In my case, I have several varieties I like to grow and save seed from, so I want to grow them separately. Containers let me do this. These are an early Macedonian sweet pepper with great flavor.

Gardening Books Considerations

Gardening in the Ozarks isn’t like gardening anywhere else. Many of the books available come from other places, Vermont, Illinois, Michigan. Others are about fancy gardens I have no time for.

When I read one of these books, I have to evaluate the advice from the perspective of the Ozarks. The effects of climate change are playing havoc with gardening schedules as well.

Why Read Them?

Take the book I’m reading now “The Vegetable Gardener’s Container Bible”. It’s written for northern gardeners with short, cool growing seasons. The Ozarks has a longer, much hotter season.

What I take away from this book are ideas and advice about using containers in the garden. I’ve got several and I’m still learning how to get the most from them. Reading about them lets me find out some answers without making the mistakes.

Container gardening with tomatoes
Containers keep plants separate, allow targeted fertilizing, keep weeds at bay except for grass growing around the container, and let me put plants wherever I want. Keeping tomato vines in check is challenging.

Why Use Containers?

Originally, I used containers for special peppers I wanted to keep away from the bell peppers I grew in the garden. There are four pair set up around the house and yard.

These are cattle lick tubs and will hold one tomato plant of four pepper plants easily.

Now I have three tubs in the garden along with two raised beds which are permanent containers and a long metal trough. Other than growing peppers and spinach in these, I don’t know much.

Last year I had leeks in one. They did well. What about this year? That’s why I’m reading some gardening books. Suggestions so far are for lettuce, carrots, bok choi and bush squash. The first three have possibilities. The last would be a mistake here in my garden.

And so the season begins.

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Choosing Tomatoes To Grow

Perhaps it would be easier if I grew the same kinds every year. Instead, I end up choosing tomatoes to grow each winter.

Winter? Yes. That’s when the seed catalogs arrive. Those seeds must arrive at my mailbox before the end of February so I can start my little transplants the beginning of March.

What’s the Difference?

All those pictures look so appealing. How do I choose which ones to grow? The first thing is determinant and indeterminant.

Determinant tomatoes grow to a certain height, put out all their blossoms, develop all their fruit and quit. This is great if you want all your tomatoes at one time for making sauce or salsa. It’s not great if you want fresh tomatoes all summer.

Indeterminant plants send up branches that keep on growing all season. Although these are called vines, they really aren’t as they don’t twine or have tendrils to hold them in place.

These plants blossom continuously over the season. Their fruit ripens a few at a time. I like this best, so I choose indeterminant plants.

first tomato not going to farmers market
This tomato will turn red. Tomatoes are a gardening favorite and choosing the right ones can be challenging. I found this Bonnie’s Best to be a nice tomato, but a bit on the small side.

Aren’t Tomatoes Red?

If you believe that, you’ve only seen them in grocery stores. Catalogs have them in red, pink, yellow, striped, blue, white and green.

My preference is for a red or pink, a yellow or striped and a paste tomato. This last is usually a long fruit with small seed sections inside reducing the amount of moisture and increasing the amount of flesh which is great for cooking.

A piece of tomato trivia: A regular tomato is 95% water, more than a watermelon at 92%.

The full flavor is found in the red and pink varieties. Yellow and striped tend to be less acidic and sweeter.

How Big?

Those huge tomatoes may be good bragging material, but they may not be the best choice. Cherry tomatoes make great snacks needing daily picking.

Bigger tomatoes can vary considerably. I prefer those with a mature weight of about a pound. These make nice slices or are enough for two salads.

Time to Maturity

Even a light frost decimates tomato vines. My season runs from May (to miss last frosts) to the end of September. That’s roughly 120 days.

If, when choosing tomatoes to grow, I pick one taking 95 days from putting in a transplant to first fruit, I’m not going to get many tomatoes. I try to stay around 80 days.

There’s a lot to consider when choosing tomatoes to grow. Those delicious fruit are worth all the trouble.

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GKP Writing News

Chemistry Equipment

I taught chemistry at small, rural schools. They didn’t have a lot of money for chemistry equipment. Still, I had the basic stuff.

It’s possible to buy beakers, flasks, balances and more online. Unless a student is really serious about a chemistry career or one involving a lot of chemistry, such an investment seems unnecessary to me.

Why Am I thinking About Chemistry Equipment?

I’m busy making up more puzzles for “The Chemistry Project” and wanted more word search types. That takes a list of words. So, I looked up things commonly found in a well-equipped chem lab.

Many of the names like Erlenmeyer flask, Florence flask and graduated cylinder are long. That makes such a puzzle challenging to create.

For those unfamiliar with these terms: Beakers are the cylindrical glass containers. Erlenmeyer flasks are the conical containers. Florence flasks have thin necks and a round bottom with a flat place so they sit on the lab bench. A graduated cylinder is a tall tube calibrated in milliliters (cubic centimeters) for measuring out liquids.

glass jars are homemade chemistry equipment
Glass peanut butter jars make good home substitutions for beakers. They, measuring cups and other containers doubling as chemistry equipment do need to be glass. Glass tends to not react, melt, dissolve, contaminate and is easy to look through. Spoons should be stainless steel.

Home Equivalents

Since I don’t have the professional equipment, I went looking for substitutes. Empty glass peanut butter jars work as beakers. Eyedroppers work as dropper pipets.

The scales I use were purchased. They aren’t as nice as the three-beam balances, but they do work for the Investigations I do.

Water can be massed to be more accurate for volumes. If I come up with a tall, thin jar, I can even mark it out as a graduated cylinder.

What About Chemicals?

It was so nice to walk into my supply closet and pick out various chemicals. There were various metallic nitrates for flame tests. Different acids for experiments.

Now I rely on the local markets and stores. It’s amazing how much you can do using sugar, salt, rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts.

Perhaps a good part of this making do for chemistry equipment, is having to examine each Investigation for its true purpose. And that is the point of chemistry: to understand how and why substances behave as they do.

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GKP Writing News

Encouraging Literacy

There’s a push in St. Louis encouraging literacy among students usually shoved aside. St. Louis schools have long been having problems trying to meet state standards and innovative approaches help.

Many of these students live in poverty. There are few, if any, books in their homes. Parents who read set an example for their children.

Why Promote Literacy?

Reading is basic. If a student can’t read, that student fails in every subject as all of them require reading.

In my area the schools rely on something called AR. This has a reading list and students are required to read books from it, take a comprehension test and go on to the next. It sounds good. It isn’t.

Teaching Reading

When I was in high school, my mother became involved with Laubach Literacy teaching illiterate adults to read and write. One out of five adults in the U.S. was statistically reading below a fourth grade level, unable to fill out an employment application.

One young man, just turned 16, was a student. My mother found he could read. He hated to. The only books he read were technical ones, difficult to understand. The key was finding books on topics he enjoyed. Reading was not drudgery, but fun.

Books come on all subjects, on all levels, in so many sizes. Somewhere there is a book to interest almost any student.

Love of Reading

Forcing students to read doesn’t encourage reading. It discourages it. That is what caught my eye about the St. Louis approach. It uses videos and comic books to interest students. It makes reading fun.

The material doesn’t shy away from vocabulary. It introduces new words, big words. My Laubach background says to repeat a new word five times and this program seems to do that.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
A third piece of literacy is speaking. Just because you can talk, doesn’t mean you know how to speak clearly as when leaving phone messages or doing presentations. One way to promote good diction is saying tongue twisters. “For Love of Goats” is full of tongue twisters and alliterations, perfect for helping with pronunciation and growing vocabulary.

Reading and Writing

Reading is the beginning. It’s a great way to get information, explore the imagination. Writing lets students tell others about this and exercise their own imaginations.

So many students hate to write. School lessons are often tedious and, like with reading, forced assignments on given topics.

This is where an approach like NaNo’s Young Writer’s Program comes into play. You can check it out at www.nanowrimo.org.

We hear so much about making our country great again. The first step to acomplishing that is by encouraging literacy.

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Garden Planning Exercise

Spring fever hit early this year as weather vacillates between winter and spring. One way I cope is doing a garden planning exercise.

Such an activity seems essential. It often ends up being busy work.

Beginning

My garden is a mishmash of beds, raised beds, permanent plantings, unwanted plantings, outside influences and an eternal weed invasion. It helps to walk around to refresh my memory about the number and placements of the beds. I get to make a side list of things to do and prioritize them at the same time.

The walk around lets me remember how and what was planted last year, how it did and plan changes. Much of my planting is locked in now due to a couple of large black walnut trees.

schematic for garden planning exercise
A garden schematic doesn’t have to be to scale. All it needs to be is complete for all the planting areas. I have several permanent plantings: the flower section, garlic, walking onions, hollyhocks, Jerusalem artichokes and garlic chives. The bamboo thinks it’s permanent. The others are planting areas. The big question is how much I can squash into each area trying to remember the plants can get big.

Paperwork

Doing a schematic of my garden has turned out to be important. Somehow I keep miscounting the number of garden beds when it isn’t written down. Planting a nonexistent bed or ending up with an empty one makes a mess of any plans.

There are five beds down one side of the garden. These get leaves, walnuts etc. on them so no tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sunflowers or other sensitive plants can grow there. I can grow beans, squash and okra.

Three beds are in the back along with narrow beds along the shade house. This year tomatoes will be in the beds. Lima beans, butternut squash and sugar pie pumpkins will grow over the shade house providing shade for snow peas, Napa cabbage, Chinese celery, bok choi, beets, greens and leeks. In the fall rutabaga and winter radishes will move in.

The raised beds are listed for greens and carrots. One side garden will smother under monster squash, favorite of the goats. The other, away from the black walnut tree, will have sunflowers, tomatoes and peppers.

Undecided Places

Three beds are not assigned yet. I have another monster squash, watermelon, extra peppers, bush limas and mung beans going somewhere. Perhaps I will have winter melon too.

So much for my garden planning exercise. Now reality can take over.

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GKP Writing News

Doing Digital and Print Versions

Normally I write my science activity books in a format for printing. “The Chemistry Project” is different as I’m doing digital and print versions at the same time.

There needs to be some clarification. “The City Water Project” does have an eBook version which can be considered digital. With “The Chemistry Project” there will be an eBook version, but the digital version is like a serial version where the separate parts are done as teaching units and offered as digital downloads.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Unlike “The Pumpkin Project” or “Goat Games”, I tried to make this book more eBook friendly with my image placements. However, the pdf version is the best digital one.

Print and eBooks are Different

Even print and ebook formats have differences. The most obvious one is the lack of page numbers in ebooks. What these do include are hyperlinks making it easy to move around within the book or even outside the book to internet sites related to the book.

Images concern me. My science activity books have lots of photographs in them. In a print version, those images can be placed singly or surrounded by text. In an ebook version the image must stand alone with the text preceding and following it.

Keeping Track

Doing digital and print versions at the same time can get confusing. I’m trying to minimize this by keeping them much alike, at least to start with. However, each has a different file name.

Both versions have the same Investigations, Activities, puzzles and chem notes. Each Part is being done separately with a title page and equipment list. The puzzle answers are at the end of each part.

When the print version is complete, I will move the puzzle answers to the back of the book. The only title page will be at the beginning as will the cumulative equipment list.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
This is what I think will be the title page for “The Chemistry Project”. The print version will use this only once. The digital versions, as this one is, will have one for each Part.

Getting It Done

The biggest part of doing “The Chemistry Project” is going over all of the Investigations and Activities. Yes, I did them, even have pictures for them, from ten years ago.

Now I am going over each one, rewriting and editing them. So I get to redo them taking new pictures.

That means doing digital and print versions of this science activity book will take longer than expected.

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Winter Eggs

I like eggs and use them year round. That means my chickens need to lay winter eggs even though they normally wouldn’t.

Chickens are what is called a long day bird. This means they naturally lay eggs when the days are growing longer or are long as in spring and summer, then stop in the fall. Since chickens lay eggs to raise chicks, this puts hatching at the best time of the year.

Domestic chickens don’t usually raise their own chicks. Some breeds don’t get broody and try to set. Other breeds are a disaster breaking the eggs they try to set.

Columbian Wyandotte laying winter eggs
The Columbian Wyandotte hens settle down into a nest pretending they are invisible. They seem to like staying in the nest. Perhaps they are warmer sitting there. They do leave winter eggs behind.

Instead, domestic chickens are supposed to have one mission in life: laying eggs. That leaves the tie to daylength a problem for people like me who want winter eggs.

Using Lights

I have two ways to encourage winter production. One is using lights. This developed thanks to my goats.

Over the winter I milked after dark so the barn lights were on until long after the sun had set. Now I milk before dark, but walk out to turn the barn lights out later on. (This is one of the adjustments to getting older.)

Not All Lights Work

When the first energy saver lights came out, I put them up in my barn. Changing light bulbs out there is a nuisance and these were supposed to work for years.

Egg production almost ceased that fall. It didn’t start up again until mid-January with longer days.

I went back to incandescent bulbs and had eggs the next winter.

My next experiment was with Daylight LED bulbs. A friend assured me these do work. They didn’t for me, although I suspect I needed more wattage.

Rhode Island Red hen laying winter eggs
I find the Rhode Island Red hens are nervous and easily upset. This one was sitting quietly until I aimed the camera. She began to panic. I left so she would settle down again as I do appreciate those winter eggs.

Raising Pullets

My second method is to raise pullets each spring. If the chicks are hatched in April, the pullets should start laying about October into November and continue laying over the winter.

There may be other approaches that work. These two work for me and result in plenty of winter eggs.

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GKP Writing News

Reality Check

Living in the Ozark hills can be challenging. The last couple of days have been a reality check for my novel.

Storms, especially big ones, can knock out the electricity in the rural areas. A derecho went by one year soaking the ground, snapping off trees and power poles. The power was off for almost a week. Intercounty Electric moved the lines up from the creek bed then so we’ve had little trouble with outages since.

Until yesterday.

Four inches of wet snow fell overnight. That’s not much. It did sit on wires, branches, everywhere. And the electric power went off about 8 a.m.

In the novel Mindy loses her electricity. I’d dredged through my memory to fill in details like having no water, a quiet house etc.

Another result is loss of the refrigerator. Here I’d goofed. I’d thought things inside would gather condensation as they began to warm. My surprise reality check showed they don’t. Instead, everything gradually goes from cold to cool to room temperature. I didn’t get into the freezers as I had a lot of frozen food and preferred it to stay frozen as long as possible.

snow brings a reality check
The snow doesn’t look like much. Its weight on branches brought down trees and downing electric lines, my novel come to life. The green patch is watercress which stays green year round, even under ice.

Waiting

The day moved on. It’s a bit unsettling how dependent we’ve gotten on having electricity as we didn’t up north. No computer so no writing. No fans so no furnace letting the house slowly cool off.

We did have some heat. Living in the country with wooded property, we have a wood stove. A fan normally blows the heat out into the house, but convection air currents do that too, although more slowly.

As evening moved in, there were no lights and no movie. Cooking by candlelight is challenging. Evening time was spent reading by candlelight.

The electricity came back on a little before six the next morning. My reality check ended with the roar of furnace fans and refrigerator hum.

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Snow Days

Weather forecasts said snow was coming to the Ozarks. The kind six to ten inches of white stuff enforce.

Up north in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, ten inches isn’t much. The big snow ploughs race over the roads and life continues.

In the Ozarks ten inches is a big deal as so much at one time is rare. There are no ploughs to clear the roads. There are trucks with blades to shove the snow to the sides of the roads where it builds into a berm and slowly melts.

Snow Falls

After dark, when I locked my chickens up for the night, flakes were starting to fall. The temperature remained a degree or two above freezing, so it didn’t stick on the ground. It did freeze to branches and electric wires.

More kept falling over night. The temperature didn’t drop much, so it was a wet, heavy snow.

In the morning four inches was piled up on everything. The temperature was slightly above freezing leaving gutters and roofs dripping.

birds waiting to eat
This year has brought a lot of finches along with the juncos and sparrows to our bird feeder. Purple finches predominate, but goldfinches are around too. They perch in a neighboring peach tree waiting for room on the feeder so they can swoop in for a sunflower seed or two.

Wet Snow

Heavy, wet snow is hard to clear. It sticks to the shovel. It crunches down into ice.

The chickens and goats had snow days looming. Neither likes to be out in the white stuff.

Wet snow on tree branches brought down trees downing electric lines for over 1600 residences. My barn lights went out leaving the chickens and goats in a dimly lit barn. They were not impressed.

Birds mob feeder on snow days
Our bird feeder is cobbled together and used year round. Visitors vary in number. Snow days bring in record numbers of birds. Cardinals, various finches, red-bellied and downy woodpeckers, blue jays, morning doves, titmice, chickadees, nuthatches and sparrows are common.

End of Snow Days

The next morning brought the electricity back on. The barn was again light as the chickens were still locked in.

The clouds broke up and sunlight turned the back wall of the barn warm. The goats stood around soaking up the rays.

Roofs began to melt off. Some pasture grasses were visible again. And the reason we moved to the Ozarks was reaffirmed: Snow only stays a few days.

Read more about Ozark nature in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.