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

Choosing Books

Choosing books to read is personal, a reflection of a person’s likes and dislikes. When I was young, nine or ten, my reading fell into two camps: Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton mysteries and horse stories.

The mysteries were on the shelf at home. I knew exactly where to find both fiction and nonfiction horse stories in the library. I read them, then reread my favorites.

Broadening My Horizons

One day my mother laid down the law. I was allowed only one horse story and had to take out some other kind of book each trip to the library. I was furious.

My mother encouraged me to read the classics. I met the Three Musketeers. I hated Gulliver’s Story and still do. Nature books came home often.

Teachers at school pushed my horizons even further with their reading lists. A list would have fifty to one hundred books on it with a requirement of four or five. Choosing books from the lists was up to the students.

At that time, I started out resenting such interference. I was happy with my few choices.

cover for "Waiting For Fairies" by Karen GoatKeeper
As in my reading, I stretch my writing to challenge my boundaries as with “Waiting For Fairies”, a picture book that I illustrated as well as wrote.

Reading Widely

Now I’m glad I was pushed out of such a narrow book focus. There are so many kinds of books by so many authors available. Many aren’t be to my taste. Others are welcome discoveries.

So many people seem to only read mysteries or thrillers or Westerns or romance or horror. Some even limit the number of authors they will read. What a shame. They are missing out on so many good books.

There are series I read all of. Tony Hillerman, the Cat Who books and Mrs. Pollifax come to mind. But these are not the only books I read.

I just finished “Zorro” by Isabel Allende translated from the Spanish. I’m reading “The Cat Who Saved Books” by Sosuke Natsukawa translated from the Japanese. Reading books from other cultures opens a window into the cultures of other countries.

“The Hate You Give” and “On the Come Up” by Angie Thomas opened a window into life in the inner city. “They Called Us Enemy” by George Takai taught me some U.S. history I was unaware of.

Choosing books from many authors, from and about many times and from many countries enlarges my life. Give it a try. You might find your world getting bigger too.

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Latest From High Reaches

Autumn Blues

The trees here turn the usual autumn colors: yellows, reds, purples. There are blues out on the hills as the asters are blooming. Most of the ones along the road fell victim to the brush cutter.

I’m the one with the autumn blues.

My garden is sad as the summer crops wither away. A week of nights only a degree or two above freezing took its toll. Nothing is black yet, but soon.

autumn bounty for the goats
After gorging on acorns, my High Reaches Nubian herd moves into pastures now lush after rain broke the drought to gobble grass and delicious weeds. Later these goats will waddle into the barn, after I chase them in, and relax chewing their cuds, ignoring the milk room and grain.

Piles of tomatoes and peppers make me feel guilty every time I go in the kitchen until they are put up.

The days keep getting shorter. There is less and less time to get things done and the ‘To Do’ list keeps getting longer with autumn clean up added.

Black walnuts and leaves are falling like the rain my garden wishes would fall. No one in town is buying the walnuts this year. I still have to pick a lot up or go suddenly roller skating across the lawn.

New England Asters are part of the autumn blues
Fall is aster time. Most asters are some shade of blue. New England asters are royal purple with gold centers. The plants can be four or five feet tall covered with flowers, a spectacular sight.

Acorns are falling on the hills. My goats spend their days gorging and don’t bother to come to the gate in the evening, much less come in to eat and get milked. It can take almost an hour to find the herd and chase it in.

Autumn blues reflect the end of the summer, the coming of winter cold, another year gone by.

These are a matter of point of view. There are good things about autumn. The trees are lovely in their fall colors. My favorite New England Asters are blooming where I asked the brush cutter to spare them.

fall seedlings cheer up autumn blues
These bok choi and Chinese Napa cabbage are growing fast this fall. The bok choi is more tender frost wise, but the shade house will become an unheated greenhouse after killing frost. And old blankets and towels are great for seedling and plant protection.

My fall garden of cabbage, lettuce, bok choi, turnips and rutabaga is up. There is even a line of spinach missed by the mole that dug up many of the seedlings.

The goats are in breeding season. Even though I keep no kids now, spring kids are fun to watch and enjoy for a few months.

Out on the hills the barred owls are calling. The deer and wild turkeys are out.

I may have the autumn blues now, but they will pass leaving the anticipation of making plans for next year.

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Latest From High Reaches

Pawpaw Bonanza

After a couple of lean years due to late frosts, this year is a pawpaw bonanza year. The kitchen window sill and counter are piled up with these delicious fruits.

Although pawpaws can be used in most of the ways bananas are, we choose to eat them fresh. I do little dessert baking now, so freezing them for this is pointless.

That is one of the annoyances of growing old. I look at desserts and spend a couple of months taking the extra pounds off.

pawpaw flowers
Once spring has warmed up, the pawpaws open their flowers. These red/purple bells hang down in lines from new twigs. Often a line of flowers from green bud to fully open line the same twig.

Can Pawpaws be Commercial?

There is again talk of making pawpaws a commercial fruit. The idea is doomed as a pawpaw bonanza year is not reliable and growing them is not easy.

First, pawpaws are a true understory tree. Others like redbuds and flowering dogwoods are called understory trees, but they grow is many directions seeking light. Pawpaws grow straight and tall in deep shade with their large leaves spread out.

Redbuds and flowering dogwoods grow happily out in full sun. Pawpaws, if they survive the first couple of years as UV light kills them, grow with their leaves hanging down as if to show their misery.

Second is pollination. Many of our fruits are pollinated by bees with their hives moved around on trailers. Pawpaws are pollinated by flies and beetles farmers like to assault with sprays.

pawpaw bonanaza fruit
Pawpaw fruits can be single or up to seven in a cluster. Larger clusters have smaller individual fruits. They spend the summer growing from tiny green tubes to these large green potato-shaped fruits. Raccoons move in just before they ripen and nibble the ends off or toss them on the ground, breaking branches as they move through the tree. For home use, pick the fruits as they start to soften. They will continue to ripen in the house and are ready to eat when soft.

Third is their fruit. Pawpaws look like green potatoes. They have two rows of large seeds. Not everyone can eat them without reacting to the flesh.

Our Pawpaws

We don’t mind. Our pawpaw bonanza is disappearing rapidly. We’ve been planting them for years and have many patches in addition to the original one now. The trees tend to have large fruit on them.

Smaller fruits are left for wildlife. They are popular with raccoons, opossums, foxes, coyotes and deer among others. They appreciate the pawpaw bonanza too.

A plus for us is having a native fruit tree growing in our ravines needing little care. The apples, Asian pears, pears and plums we planted have mostly perished from insects and disease in spite of our attempts to care for them.

This makes the year’s native persimmon and pawpaw bonanza even better.

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GKP Writing News

Banning Books

An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was about how banning books has become popular. For me, as both an author, reader and citizen, this is frightening, infuriating and frustrating.

An English teacher I had in high school told us about an incident in Arizona. It seems there were new literature books with selections from various time periods. A parent came to the school board decrying a story in which a knight put on his girdle and demanded the books be discarded.

Knights? Remember about the Dark Ages, Medieval Europe? Or maybe you don’t as so much of history seems skipped now.

At that time girdle was the name for a belt. It had nothing to do with women’s undergarments. What this parent was saying was that they were ignorant and wanted to punish everyone rather than learn something about how vocabulary changes over time.

How many other books are on the banned lists because vocabulary used in them is not today’s accepted form? Or attitudes? Use these as lessons in how we’ve changed, hopefully for the better.

Another book was a graphic novel about the Holocaust. A graphic novel is not a comic book although some are very close. This one is not.

I read a graphic novel “They Called Us Enemy” by George Takai. It was about the Japanese internment camps of World War II, camps ignored by history, denied by the government and educators. He had an interesting comment: We need to learn both the good and the bad in our history. The first makes us proud. The second is a way to do better, not repeat our mistakes.

Banning books is popular with dictators as a way to stifle thinking, knowledge, different viewpoints. Is that what we want here?

There are many books I choose not to read. Horror, romance and violent thrillers are among them. But I do not think I have the right to forbid those who like these genres to read them. And, yes, I’ve read a book or two in these genres before deciding to avoid them.

That is a most frustrating point about the present book banning. Most of these people have never read the books they want to ban. They heard about them on social media from some entity who may or may not be who they say they are.

We have many problems in our country. I choose not to write about them or politics or religion. But banning books thereby shutting off other viewpoints, facts we may not like, is not the way to solve those problems.

Problems are solved by getting them out in the open and listening, really listening, to each other. Respect is a two way street. And no one is always right about everything.

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GKP Writing News

Fast Novel Writing

I came across an article about writing novels for Kindle. It seems this author was turning out a book every nine weeks. That is fast novel writing time.

Now, I can write a novel draft in four weeks. NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) has taught me how to do that.

The steps are easy. I get an idea and think it through. Then I write down a bullet point list of plot ideas which may or may not appear in the draft. The last step is writing the draft of at least 50,000 words.

This is a rough draft. The characters aren’t really fully developed until half way through. Sometimes they even change names.

The plot has holes I can drive a semi through, if I drove a semi. There are side trips to places totally unrelated to the plot.

Facts are made up. I plan to check them out later.

In short, this is a draft, not a novel. It may be fast novel writing, but it isn’t ready for anyone to sit down and read.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
It took eight weeks to write “Dora’s Story”. It took a year to edit the novel. The draft timeline was wrong. The goat shows needed linking. I needed an illustrator. Then the grammar and spelling had to be checked. “Dora’s Story” was definitely not a product of fast novel writing.

Finishing Writing a Novel

Rewriting and editing can take months. All those facts need to be checked out. If I guessed wrong, the whole premise may fall apart leaving me writing an entirely new draft.

There is another reason I will never do fast novel writing for Kindle. I have a life outside of writing.

An author in my old writing group wanted to make it as an author. She raised sheep at the time. She sold all of them. Her husband joined her as they went to conferences.

The last I heard, she had made it as an author. All she did was research and write for her novel series.

I like my life. Going hiking and taking plant pictures. Milking the goats. Gardening. Watching the chickens.

Yes, I like writing. But fast novel writing consuming my life is not the way for me.

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Latest From High Reaches

Brushcutter Coming

City people don’t have brushcutters. In the country a brushcutter serves an important purpose as so many rural roads are lined with wild plants.

That is the draw of the roads for me. Many plants grow along the roads and are hard to find anywhere else. There are other advantages to plant hunting along the roads too.

before the brushcutter comes
Yellow ironweed lines the road. Tucked under it are the asters just starting to bloom. Several smartweeds, ground cherries and more line the road trying to set seed to grow next year.

Why Walk the Gravel Road?

First and foremost at this time of year is the lack of seed ticks. You’ve never heard of seed ticks? Lucky you.

Ticks lay eggs. When these hatch into hordes of barely larger than microscopic seed ticks starving for a meal, any passerby is fair game. They latch on by the hundreds, even thousands. And bite. And suck up a blood meal. The only good thing about them is their lack of diseases. Those they pick up from their hosts.

Second is the ease of walking. Roads, even gravel roads, are fairly open, level and hard making walking easy. Pastures and hills are much harder walking due to exuberant plant growth and terrain.

Third is the definite path. I don’t know how many plants I’ve found out in the woods and could never find again. Not even trying to have a landmark near the plant helps as some creature can come by eating or stepping on it.

brushcutter coming
The brushcutter is big. The rotary cutter can be turned to shear off bushes sticking through the fence. It can reach up to trim the trees overhanging the road. Very few plants escape it.

Disaster Looms

My nemesis is the brushcutter.

This huge machine has a rotary blade on a long, jointed arm. It mows down every plant along the road to a height of four inches. It shatters tree limbs to keep them from sagging down into the road.

After the brushcutter leaves
The flowers are gone. The plants are four inches tall. Many people like this as it increases their visibility driving down the road. Those people rarely notice the wildflowers. The brushcutter operator did skip a few places I flagged and I savor those places still covered with wildflowers.

I am left with few alternatives. One, I can stop photographing plants for the year. Two, I can restrict my walks to ShawneeMac Lakes Conservation Area. Or three, I can brave the seed ticks out in the fields.

No sprays seem to discourage seed ticks. I will lay in a supply of masking tape to remove them. And continue to take pictures.

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GKP Writing News

Teaching Basic Chemistry

Teaching basic chemistry was something I looked forward to when I was teaching high school sciences. Every year brought new challenges.

I suppose chemistry can be taught strictly from a book. That is so boring to me because science is hands on, experiments, seeing how things work. So my classes spent a lot of time in the lab.

There are lots of experiments available for a chemistry class. Most of them take lots of expensive equipment and chemicals. Small schools like the ones I was teaching basic chemistry in often don’t have lots of money for such supplies.

Some of those chemicals can be dangerous. Acids, poisons, fumes. These were not things I wanted to use a lot of in my classes. High school students aren’t always the most careful people.

Writing Science Activity Books

After I left teaching in a classroom and started writing books instead, science activity books seemed a good fit. Except I didn’t want a textbook, I wanted something more fun, more challenging.

I tackled botany first with “The Pumpkin Project” and found the concept of a science investigation, science activity, trivia, puzzles, stories and more fit the bill. But I also found writing such a book was a lot of work.

cover of "The Pumpkin Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fall investigations in “The Pumpkin Project” ask things like how to count all the seeds in a pumpkin (There’s more than one way.), just before you use the recipe for roasting them. How much water is in a pumpkin? Find out and make some pumpkin cookies too.

Instead of writing another book, I put chemistry projects first and motion physics later on my website. This brought up the challenge of how to do these without all the equipment I used to use from my storage closet. That forced me to take a good look at the experiments to find ways to achieve the same goals using everyday supplies.

This led to my second science activity book, “The City Water Project”. It has the investigations, activities, trivia, puzzles and stories I like to include. Lots of work went into doing all the investigations, activities and puzzles.

Tackling Basic Chemistry

Those chemistry projects sitting around bugged me. I started playing around with the idea for “The Chemistry Project”. Trivia and puzzles are harder for chemistry. Story ideas are harder too.

Still, there is the challenge of teaching basic chemistry for fifth grade up and all those projects using easy to obtain equipment and supplies.

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Latest From High Reaches

Datura aka Jimsonweed aka Thorn Apple

You can buy various varieties of Datura through garden catalogues. A lovely one, D. stramonium, grows wild here in the Ozarks.

This plant isn’t popular with livestock owners as it is poisonous. Another reason to avoid it is its seed production. If you grow one this year, you will have a hundred or more next year.

In a good location and year, these Datura plants get four feet tall with many sturdy branches. Each branch has tufts of large leaves and lots of flower buds.

Datura trumpet flower
Although in the nightshade family along with potatoes, tomatoes, ground cherries and more, Datura stramonium or Jimsonweed has big, spectaculat flowers. These resemble trumpets and are six inches long.

Since the flowers are lovely white trumpets, I leave a few around the workshop area. The rest succumb to the mower.

Other enemies attack any I miss. Flea beetles riddle the leaves with holes. Other insects come and go, usually escaping before I get close enough to see what they are.

Last year there was a huge plant growing in the barn lot next to the fence. The goats ignored it completely. The plant does have a rank odor when you are close to it and the goats don’t seem to like that. Poisonous plants and animals often advertise themselves to ward off nibblers.

After frost, I cut the plant down as it had a three inch trunk and dragged it out to a brush pile in the pasture. It had lots of thorn apple seed pods on it.

Looking into a Datura flower
This Datura flower isn’t open all the way, but this is my favorite view with the pinwheel effect and violet center.

This year I have a Datura colony around the brush pile. These plants are short as the grass resents the competition. They are retaliating by covering themselves with flowers every evening.

Datura is a night bloomer pollinated by moths. Big sphinx moths home in on the flowers as soon as they open. One variety of sphinx moth then lays hornworm eggs on my tomatoes.

There are very few hornworms on my tomatoes in spite of this abundance of moth food. This might be due to wasps as these very useful insects need protein for their larvae. At least one variety attacks young, soft caterpillars like hornworms.

So I get to admire the lovely Datura blooms without a hornworm infestation.

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GKP Writing News

Writing Fear Procrastination

Many writers have this little voice inside that says their writing stinks. I have that plus a legacy of being told I couldn’t write anything worthwhile. These blossom into a writing fear procrastination that kills books.

At present there are four writing projects begging to be worked on. Two are nearly ready for a final rewrite as soon as I finish up another twenty to thirty pages of draft. One is a new attempt to finish up an old idea for a science activity book. The last is my Dent County Flora, a project I have little hope of ever completing.

I do love to go hiking and taking pictures. The Flora project encourages me to do both. It’s easy to immerse myself in this project, especially in the spring and summer when so many plants are blooming. This year alone has added at least a dozen new plants and completed the picture series for even more.

passion flower lure away from writing fear procrastination
Passion flowers are one of many Ozark wildflowers luring me away to go hiking and taking pictures instead of working on my novels. It’s so easy to justify writing fear procrastination.

Except there are 2,000 plants to find in Dent County. Many grow in places some distance away from home where I have difficulty getting due to time constraints.

This should be a fun hobby, not my main writing project.

All summer I have done little except the website posts and the Flora pages. My two novels have been ignored. Even worse, I see my writing fear procrastination in full force when I even think about them.

There is a cure, sort of. Nothing really makes those little voices go away. However, they can be shoved into a corner and ignored.

The cure? Sit down at the computer. Open the novel file. Find where I left off on the draft. And write 500 words every day. In two weeks the draft will be done.

Except today I have to finish the two posts for the website for tomorrow. This means downloading pictures. So much for another hour.

And writing fear procrastination wins for another morning.

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Latest From High Reaches

Monster Squash Attack

Winter squash does put out long vines. But my Yuxi Jiang Bing Gua squash and Tahitian Melons are monster squash.

I’ve grown them for several years so I know they tend to get big. This year I planned for that. At least, I thought I did.

Yuxi Monster Squash
Those leaves really are huge, nearly 18 inches across. This Yuxi winter squash can be eaten young like summer squash or allowed to shell and kept as winter squash. These have a scallopped edge with a shape much like patty pans.

The Yuxi went into a plot about twenty feet square. It has deer fence eight feet tall on two sides, chick fence six feet tall on another and the four foot tall garden fence behind it. I expected to keep the vines growing around the area.

This monster squash had other plans. It stayed small for a week or so gathering root power. Then the vines shot off in all directions. I tried to curve them around. They sent out branches. They climbed the fences. They invaded the garden.

How fast does this monster squash grow? I’m not sure, but a foot a night might be a low estimate.

Tahitian Melon Monster Squash
Although called Tahitian Melon, this is a winter squash allowed to shell with huge keeping times, a year and more. They are large with a long curved neck. The vines are huge and refuse any efforts to contain them. The male flowers with their single fused stamen are large. The female flowers with their four sided pistil are the size of dinner plates. The baby melons grow fast.

The Tahitian melons, actually a winter squash, had no intention of letting the Yuxi have all the fun. These had a thirty foot run to the far fence. This had deer fence along the side and at one end. The other two sides are against the garden.

Ten tomato plants are unfortunate enough to be against the garden fence side. Picking is done by leaning over the garden fence. The melon vines are climbing over them and up the side deer fence.

Tahitian monster squash has huge leaves, bigger than the Yuxi which is no slouch. These are bigger than dinner plates. It too grows at least a foot a night. That is every vine tip doing this.

The Yuxi finally opened a few male flowers. It is behind the Tahitian melons. And those have the biggest flowers I’ve ever seen on a squash plant. The melons are over two feet with a strong hook.

Will these monster squash ripen any fruit before frost? My goats hope so. They love these almost as much as they love pumpkins now buried under the Yuxi.