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

Telling Wants From Needs

I seem to be an old school homesteader, what was called a back-to-the-land person. These people had a few things in common: live a simple, basic life; and little to no money. That last made telling wants from needs essential.

Needs

Needs are things a person must have to survive. Shelter, food, water are the ones most people think of. In our society clothes should be added.

One most people don’t think of is trash. Much of our trash now consists of plastics and other things that don’t rot away. Dumped into a back corner, they can contaminate the water table or hurt wildlife or domestic stock.

Another need not often considered is recreation. Working all day, seven days a week wears a person down. Everyone needs a break of some kind, even if it’s only sitting quietly in the woods or reading a book.

Water

Surface water (creeks, ponds and shallow wells) isn’t a safe source. Even springs need special filters as I found when researching a story for “The City Water Project”.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Although “The City Water Project” is a science activity book, it has stories about water, what it is, where we get our water supply, use this water and dispose of it as well.

Hauling water in bottles from town gets cumbersome fast. Roof gutter drain pipe showers aren’t popular in the winter. Drilled wells are expensive. City water isn’t always available.

Shelter

Tents are great shelter in the summertime. They get cold and are difficult to heat in the winter. Many people opt for mobile homes which aren’t safe in tornado and strong wind areas. Building a small, simple house isn’t that much more expensive, if you do a lot of the work yourself.

Electricity

Is electricity a need?

I’ve lived without electricity. Propane lights were adequate. This was far enough north refrigeration wasn’t a big problem.

However, I like having electricity. It runs the water pump so the house has running water. It runs the computer, the lights, appliances, so many things.

Electricity is easy to abuse. How many freezers, refrigerators, TVs and other things does a person need to have? More than one is probably in the want category.

When telling wants from needs in this, be ruthless. Exactly why and how are you using this? Can you achieve the same end in a simpler way? That smaller electric bill or generation need will repay you.

More next post.

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GKP Writing News

Admitting Mistakes

Admitting mistakes is hard to do. It’s especially hard when it is a public mistake, even when it was an accidental mistake.

I’m not a botanist, only an amateur. I study books, pictures, descriptions to identify the plants I find. There are huge folders of pictures labeled unknown on my computer.

Sunflowers are notoriously difficult to identify. I came across one that seemed so different, it had to be easy to identify.

Texas Green Eyes flower
I suppose I had wondered why these ray petals were spaced. The Helianthus sunflowers like the Ashy Sunflower have closely spaced and overlapping ray petals. Texas Green Eyes has the spaces between the rays.

Overconfidence breeds mistakes.

I studied various sources and decided this plant was the Ashy Sunflower and have believed this for ten years. And been mistaken for ten years.

There is an old saying that none are so blind as those who will not see. That was me.

The sunflowers are coming into bloom again. And I am taking pictures of them again. And putting most into the unknown folder again.

Meeting this old friend was pleasant until I took pictures and realized something I had blindly overlooked: the leaf arrangement.

reason for admitting mistakes
So many of the sunflowers blooming in mid to late summer have opposite leaves. I assumed this plant did too. But, if you look like I finally did, these leaves are alternate. Texas Green Eyes has alternate leaves. Ashy Sunflower has opposite leaves.

Simple plant leaves are grouped into opposite where the leaves stick out across from each other, whorled where more than one leaf sticks out across from each other, basal where the leaves are from a central ground source and alternate where one leaf goes off followed by another in a different direction further up the stem.

Ashy Sunflowers have opposite leaves. My familiar plant has alternate leaves. It is not an Ashy Sunflower.

Texas Green Eyes leaf
What’s really pretty about the Texas Green Eyes leaf is the scalloped edge. Most leaves have points on the teeth on the edges.

Admitting mistakes believed true for years is very hard. I didn’t believe what I saw. I checked other plants. The leaves were alternate. I was wrong and I had posted this mistake, insisting I was right.

My plant is a Texas Green Eyes. The pictures on www.missouriplants.com make this obvious. I have fixed this mistake in my botany project.

Everyone makes mistakes about lots of things. We can believe these mistakes for years. We blindly believe them even when presented with evidence we are wrong.

Admitting mistakes may be hard, but changing our mistaken beliefs seems to be even harder.

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GKP Writing News

Library Beach Story

The summer reading program at the library was about the ocean this year. This year one of the activities was to write a beach story.

Although the program is mostly for the younger set, some of the activities include us older people. Writing a beach story was one and a picture involving water is another.

Dangling a writing prompt in front of a writer begs for a response. I tried to ignore it. I was going hiking to photograph flowers, not plan out a story.

Walking is a good excuse for my mind to wander. After all, I grew up in southern California and spent lots of time at the ocean. There are so many memories.

At El Capitan State Beach one fall I found a mermaid’s purse. It was rectangular with the look and feel of a piece of kelp. Mermaid’s purses are eggs laid by a shark or ray. My tenth-grade science teacher set it up in a tank and it hatched into a six-inch swell shark a few months later.

There were two students I helped with snorkeling as part of their science project.

On yet another visit, the sand was covered with butterfly clams. These are wedge-shaped clams up to an inch long with lots of color patterns.

I’m not interested in doing memoirs. The memories were only to provide a stepping stone into a story. None of them seemed to work until another adventure came to mind.

Not all beaches have sand or rocks. I had visited two mud beaches. When the tide is in, there is a bay small boats can cross. When the tide is out, a vast expanse of mud is revealed. Under the mud live clams.

And I had my stepping stone to a beach story.

People often ask where a writer gets their ideas. Memories are one place, memories long forgotten until a writing prompt brings them back.

My beach story along with others will be posted on the Salem Public Library page. This is the Salem, Missouri, library.

Time to write is another factor. Read more in this post.

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Latest From High Reaches

Homestead Financial Battles

In these times of high inflation (I remember the 1970s and 17% interest.), homestead financial battles start taking shape. Money and time are the two sides.

Everything about homesteading takes time. When I stopped teaching, I put my wristwatch aside and thought I was free of its tyranny. Naivety.

My goats are milked twice a day. Ideally this is at the same times twelve hours apart.

Plants take a certain amount of time to grow to become productive. They must be planted at the right times or your work has no results. The same is true for mulching and watering.

These may not require a wristwatch, but they do lock you into time budgeting.

goats source of homestead financial battles
Goats like to eat. Dairy goats need good feed and hay to give lots of milk. Both are expensive. Obviously my High Reaches Nubian herd is well fed and spoiled.

On the other side is money. Money for taxes, feed, vet bills, supplies, groceries and personal items.

The homestead financial battles pit the need for time against the need for money. If you get a job, you lose the time. If you stay home to work, you need an income from something.

A budget has two sides to it as well. One is income. One is expenses. To stay solvent, the two sides must balance.

Stop and take a look at expenses. Which ones are for needs? Which are for wants? In homesteading, knowing the difference is vital.

On my homestead the needs are gardening supplies, chickens and goat feed. Some groceries such as flour are needs as well.

There are wants such as internet, haircuts, clothes (These straddle the two. Used clothing and repairing lost buttons, torn seams reduce clothing costs.), the latest book or movie. Many of these have alternate, much more inexpensive alternatives like the library for books, magazines and movies. (I except haircuts as I am a lousy barber.)

A homestead can bring in money. Selling eggs is one way. Milk and cheese are iffy as health regulations can get you into trouble. Produce requires a bigger harvest with more time and expense and a desire to eat or preserve the extra. Selling livestock.

The one sure thing is that the homestead financial battles must be considered and won by anyone wanting to homestead.

Why am I thinking about these now? One is inflation and the increase in expenses it has brought. The other is my novel still untitled and unfinished.

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Growing Potatoes

I know potatoes are cheap in the market. I just enjoy growing potatoes.

With all the weather pattern changes, potatoes have become a difficult crop. Spring is often too cool and wet with late frosts. Potatoes are very frost tender. Late spring is often an early summer with hot, dry weather.

This year I debated, but succumbed to temptation and planted a bed of Yukon Gold potatoes. The goats were supplying plenty of mulch.

People laugh when I say I am lazy. It’s not that really. I just don’t want to do unnecessary work and hilling potatoes comes under that category. I lay out my rows of seed potatoes and pile on six inches and more of mulch leaving it thinner, or with a channel, over the seed potatoes for easy emergence of sprouts.

dry potato vines means time for digging potatoes
Only a couple of weeks ago these dry vines were robust green plants with flowers on them. Their potatoes are formed, hiding under the mulch, waiting for rain so they can again grow into potato plants. I would rather put the potatoes in the pantry to cook up for dinner.

With potatoes mulch serves several purposes. The usual ones of weed control and moisture retention are two. Cold, wet springs make that last a problem some years.

Another purpose for potatoes is frost control. The surface of the mulch may have frost on it, but the potatoes are safe. Any sprouts above the mulch will be nipped.

The last purpose of the mulch is easy harvest. No digging. Move the mulch aside and pick up the potatoes.

This year there is a complication. Last year I lost my potatoes to a raccoon. The raccoon wasn’t interested in the potatoes. Instead, she dug up the mulch along with the potatoes in search of worms and grubs.

The raccoon was back this spring. I’m assuming only one raccoon, but that may be wrong, probably is, and I’m not fond of shooting them for hunting for food to feed their babies.

growing potatoes can be rewarding
I wasn’t going to grow potatoes this year after the last two disaterous years. So I manured this bed. I enjoy growing potatoes. Potatoes do not like freshly manured soil and form the little spots or scabs. They are cut off when the potatoes are eaten.

I laid a piece of chicken wire down over my potato bed. The potatoes didn’t mind and grew up through the holes. The raccoon did mind and left them alone.

It’s now harvest time. I will pull up the wire along with the potatoes, separate them, check under the mulch for the rest of the potatoes. And plant my butternut squash.

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GKP Writing News

Completing Botany Pages

Completing botany pages for my Dent County Flora is challenging. You might ask: how hard could it be to take a picture of a flower and write a sentence about it?

That would be easy. That is not what I am doing.

One case in point would be the Wild Pink or Wherry’s Pink, Silene caroliniana. This is a lovely little spring ephemeral flower in vivid pink.

wild pinks for completing botany pages
At just over an inch across, the main way of seeing these little flowers is the vivid color, obviously the source of the common name. Wherry’s Wild Pinks bloom for only a week or two and each plant has many flowers on it.

The first step is to get pictures of the flower and plant. That assumes I’ve found the plant. I take a series of pictures including the plant, flower, side of the flower, the leaf, the stem and the fruit or seed pod.

Wherry’s Pink grows along one of my hills. I admire it every spring and take pictures of it every spring.

I sat down and began completing botany pages. There were the plant, flower, side of flower, leaf, stem pictures. And no seed pod.

A spring ephemeral plant grows quickly, blooms, sets seed and disappears. I’ve been trying to get that seed pod picture for two years now.

Last year I put up a marking flag by a group of plants. When I went back, other plants had grown over the remains of the Pinks. I couldn’t find them.

This year I found some other plants in a more open area. Lots of plants don’t like growing in the gravelly areas of the hill.

seed pos for Wherry's Wild Pinks
Like the plants, the Wherry’s Wild Pink seed pods are small, an inch or so long. As soon as these are formed, the plants start going dormant until the next year. Only luck and persistence gets a picture of these.

I went back and began to search. It is amazing how a plant can seem to disappear overnight. But I did find a couple with seed pods on them.

Now I can continue completing botany pages for Wherry’s Pinks. And for the wild peach trees as I went out to take pictures of the leaves. How I forgot to take a leaf picture, I don’t know, but I found I did last winter. Peaches are deciduous.

Once I have the pictures, choosing the ones to use, cropping, resizing and setting up the page can take an hour or more.

Maybe I should go back to writing my novel. That takes less time for each page.

I’ve walked the same hills for almost thirty years now. You would think this would get boring, but it doesn’t. Every week is different from the week before. There are always new things to see.

“My Ozark Home” was done on the twenty-fifth anniversay of my time here. It contains many of the things I saw over that time.

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GKP Writing News

Word Choices

My Writer’s Digest magazine arrived. I browse through it over days as time allows, but an opening ad caught my eye talking about word choices.

This program promised to have all possible word choices in front of a writer instantly. What happened to having a large vocabulary? What about a dictionary or a thesaurus?

Writing advice often includes doing wide ranging reading in a variety of genres. What do people do as they read? Skip over the words they don’t know? Or are the books they choose those with limited vocabularies in them?

When making word choices, there is more to consider than if a word sounds good. That word may be a disaster in your story.

Words have connotations and denotations. The denotation or definition may sound fine. The connotation or people’s perception of the word may sabotage its use.

How many words can you think of with very different meanings? Girdle? Gay? Queer? Dick?

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper required making word choices
I love tongue twisters and the sounds of words. That made writing this book fun as well as challenging. Do you think such things are foolish wates of time? They teach vocabulary and pronunciation in a fun way. How fast can you say “Goats Gallop Gaily” three times?

How about homonyms? Do you use to, two or too? How about weather, whether and wether? Spellcheck and Grammar check is little to no help.

I faced lots of word choices while writing “For Love of Goats” as it depends on not only the meaning, but the sounds of words. It’s a good thing I like dictionaries.

In “For Love of Goats” each letter of the alphabet is targeted for a tongue twister or story about goats. Both used alliteration.

I started by looking through the dictionary list of words for that letter or sound in the cases of c, q, and k. Did I know all the words? No. That’s what definitions are for.

Looking over these word choices, a story idea might come to mind. Some were harder than others. Q took several tries as did z.

Yes, the lists were valuable helps. But a large vocabulary was the biggest help.

You don’t have a large vocabulary? Try Qwilleran’s method (The Cat Who books). Flip open a dictionary and point to a word. If you already know it, try again. Read the definition and try using that word several times during the day.

And keep a dictionary near as you choose books with words you don’t know. Don’t skip them. Look them up. Your writing may get more interesting.

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Lots of Water News

Gardens need water, lots of water. Did you know tomatoes are 95% water? That’s more than a watermelon’s 92%.

I have a big, thirsty garden and no hose. I do have rain barrels, but they empty fast. It takes a whole barrel to water my garden now and much of it is still in the seedling stage.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper with lots of water facts
Find trivia, puzzles, stories, investigations and activities about water in this science activity book.

Rain is not a reliable option. Ozark summer weather does have rain, if you are under the right cloud at the right time.

My solution is to use creek water. Presently I run a pump once a week, soak everything down and fill the barrels. I use watering cans in between. Seedlings get everyday service. Bigger plants get water every other day.

When the plants get bigger, if the raccoon doesn’t get them first, I’ll run the pump a couple of times a week. Lots of produce takes lots of water.

Most people have hoses. I did growing up. There is just no way to hook one up presently.

Rural Missouri is different about water. Towns have water departments, water meters and bills. Rural people have wells, water tanks or springs. I found out lots about this as I wrote “The City Water Project”.

Young people in this country don’t concern themselves with water. Turn on a tap and water flows out.

Where dies the water come from? Where does the extra go? Do you know? Perhaps you should.

lots of water flows down this creek
Right now this Ozark creek looks shallow and tame. It has deeper pools here and there. Numerous creatures like fish, crayfish, snails and insect larvae call it home. During and after a six-inch rain, this lazy creek is a muddy torrent filling this space to several feet deep. At one time people used creeks like this for water in the house. This is no longer considered safe to do. The water is appreciated in my garden.

Storms here in the Ozarks are different now. They dump lots of water fast, cause the creeks to flood, wash out their banks.

Other places get unimaginable amounts of rain as the monsoons in Southeast Asia. Others have droughts as the Southwest and Australia.

Lots of people need lots of water. It isn’t distributed equally. Too often water is wasted or polluted. And my garden isn’t the only place that needs lots of water.

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GKP Writing News

Going to Camp NaNo

Hot weather, endless things needing to be done, lack of drive to write anything, all make going to Camp NaNo seem hopeless. Yet, they also give incentive to participate.

This year has been an endless parade of difficulties. The latest is the air compressor springing a leak as the pressure tank rusted out. Luckily there was little pressure in the tank as I was filling it to pump up a tire. Otherwise, things might have been messy.

April was difficult as rain or pretend rain (enough to be wet, not enough to do anything) came through every couple of days. My cleaned-out goat barn is now a morass. My garden is a jungle of weeds and summer crops aren’t all planted yet.

Good things are happening too. The pullets are growing well and are staying healthy, amazingly enough. The kids are doing well. I’ve taken lots of plant pictures and am busy with the Dent County Flora books.

Yes, books.

There are lots of single volume wildflower guides. They are not complete, offering only a selection of those flowers the author thought were most common.

Excluding grasses, rushes and sedges, Dent County has an easy 1500 plants. At one plant per page, that is one enormous book. So my flora is split into smaller volumes: Dent County Blues (blue, purple and brown flowers); Dent County Reds (red, yellow and orange flowers); etc.

So, I am going to Camp NaNo with two projects in mind. One is doing pages in the flora books. The other is to finish the novel draft I’ve been ignoring for one excuse after another.

That is one of the main reasons I do keep going to Camp NaNo and joining National Novel Writing Month. I want to make my goal in the allotted time and I get back into the writing groove.

Many of my novels, including “Capri Capers“and “Dora’s Story“, began as NaNo novels.

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Going to Farmers Market

Going to Farmers Market is interesting. I’m always late and never seem to have much to sell, but I like meeting with the other vendors and watching the people.

This week my garlic is ready to pull.

Every fall I shove garlic cloves into the ground, add mulch and wait. The leaves push their way out through the straw and stay green all winter.

Spring brings fast growth. Then the scapes or flower heads appear. Gardening books say to clip these off. They are good sliced and added to stir fry.

One of the vendors clued me in on the next step. I used to wait until the tops died down to pull the bulbs and had many of them split into cloves. He told me to pull the bulbs when the bottom couple of leaf sets turned yellow. This works great.

One of my difficulties taking produce like garlic and going to Farmers Market is pricing it. That is even more complicated now as prices soar in the store.

Another complication is dealing with people who believe vendors should charge much less than the store for their produce. Raising produce as a small gardener or farmer takes more work than large commercial operations.

first tomato not going to farmers market
Many people plant tomato transplants early. As long as the weather stays cold, even without frost, the plants sit there. Warm weather arrives. The plants thrive and the first tomatoes start forming. They seem to stay green forever. Once they start ripening, the tomato glut begins.

There is one exception: tomatoes. Nothing tastes like a vine ripened tomato.

Store tomatoes are picked green so they will ship with minimum damage. Ethylene gas is a natural ripening agent, but it only makes a tomato appear red. The tomato is still green with little real flavor.

Our cool, wet April has made tomatoes late for Farmers Market. I am watching my green tomatoes get bigger with no touch of red on any of them.

Will my tomatoes join me going to Farmers Market? Probably not many will.

Tomatoes are one crop we will eat lots of. Extras will be frozen. The day before frost, the green ones will go into the pantry where many will turn red.

The same routine as the store uses? On the surface. My tomatoes will still taste a lot better.

The store doesn’t carry Speckled Roman, Pineapple, Bonnie’s Best or Boxcar Willie. These are tomatoes bred for flavor, not marketability.

In “Mistaken Promises” Hazel Whitmore raises pullets to show at the county fair. Her mother and grandfather compete with their tomatoes.