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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Winter Mullein Rosettes

On a winter walk the side of the road is green with chicory, dandelion, dock and more stubbornly hugging the dirt. More noticeable are the winter mullein rosettes.

A number of plants called biennials spend a year growing, overwinter and bloom the next year. Mullein and thistles are some of them.

thistle winter rosette
Thistle rosettes are easy to know. The prickly leaves mark this one as a bull thistle.

Thistles

Bull thistle rosettes invaded the yards around the house a number of years ago. These are a biennial so the rosette appears first and the flowers the next year. We left a couple to see what the plants would be like.

Great shafts lined with thorns grew up reaching five or six feet tall. These had many branches and each branch was tipped with a pink hairy flower head.

These flowers are very popular. Hummingbirds drink nectar. Butterflies walk around on them sipping. Later a variety of birds including goldfinches, cardinals and sparrows eat the seeds.

Moth Mullein flowers
Moth mullein is a lovely wild flower. I let several grow and flower in my garden as well as in the yard. They do tend to come up in the hundreds the next year.

Winter Mullein Rosettes

Two mulleins invaded the front yard years ago. One is moth mullein with spikes of white flowers with purple hairy stamens. These usually get two feet tall, but can make three.

winter mullein rosette
Nothing else looks like a winter mullein rosette. The leaves can be darker green, but they are always fuzzy.

Common mullein rosettes have big, furry leaves looking like a bird nest on the ground. Unlike thistles that hug the ground, even under where the lawn mower reaches, mullein leaves stand up.

In the summer, tall stalks grow up five or six feet. Usually there is a single one with others appearing later as branches. Other times the stalks become elaborate candelabra. Yellow flowers open randomly along the stalks.

Herbal Tea

Nothing seems to be fond of the furry mullein leaves. However, they do make a nice herb tea. It has a slightly dusty, mild taste. A single leaf is good for two batches of tea for me. I usually toss in some mint leaves or calendula flowers with it.

The impressive flower spikes and wild tea are good reasons to let the mulleins grow.

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GKP Writing News

New Pumpkin Project Book

When “The Pumpkin Project” was written, I went to a local printer and had a couple of boxes of books printed. Those books are almost gone as is the printer. Now there will be a new “Pumpkin Project” book.

Germinating pumpkin seeds
Does the direction a seed faces matter? How about how deep the seeds are planted? How does a seed germinate? These and other investigations try to answer these questions in the Pumpkin Project.

What Is the Pumpkin Project?

This is a science activity book and more. Although it was written for those 10 to 15 in mind, others can enjoy it too.

The basic part surrounds the 19 Investigations and 2 Projects. These begin by looking at seeds, then germination and growing pumpkins. Of course, jack 0’lanterns are one of the projects.

The Pumpkin Stories tell about the history, seed packets, growing giant pumpkins and canning pumpkins. Puzzles are scattered throughout the book including mazes, searches, codes and more.

Recipes for cooking up pumpkins end the book. These are still tasty. I do keep making them from time to time to make sure. After all, pumpkin cookies are my favorite.

Painted Jack o'Lantern
One of the Pumpkin Project projects is to create a jack o’lantern. Directions are for painting and carving a pumpkin.

Changes

Editing a book, especially one as big as the “Pumpkin Project” at over 200 pages isn’t easy. Mistakes slip by. I fixed a lot of these.

Nothing much else changed. I worked on this book for several years, doing and redoing the Investigations. Research took time along with several trips to gather information and pictures.

Missouri State Champion Giant Pumpkin
Growing giant pumpkins takes dedication. This one was 878.5 pounds. Find out more about growing these giants in the Pumpkin Project.

What About the New Pumpkin Project Book?

The biggest changes will be in the cover. My original book has a spiral binding, one I like. Unfortunately, such bindings are only available from private printers and mine has moved to St. Louis.

That leaves me choosing between a paper cover or a hardback cover. Hardbacks are nice, but expensive. This is not a cheap book to print as it is so long and in color. I will have to choose paperback.

Will the price change? Probably. How much? I won’t know until I get the book printed.

The new Pumpkin Project book will be done and out soon.

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Watching the Birds

Cold weather and snow make for indoor days. We would rather be outside, but settle for watching the birds at the bird feeder.

That feeder was one of the first things we put up over thirty years ago. It has seen some changes over the years, but the bird crowd doesn’t mind as long as the sunflower seeds arrive every morning.

Watching the birds is fun with blue jays
When the blue jays move onto the bird feeder, they try to chase everyone else off. It doesn’t work well. Squirrels sneer at them.

The Feeder

The feeder is a simple affair. A metal tray is balanced on four t-posts with a wood rim to hold it in place. Four wood posts go up to hold a tin roof.

The tray holds a rectangular tray of sunflower seeds. An old pan without a handle holds water if the temperature is above freezing. A pottery bowl holds scratch feed. One corner has a wire cage with a suet cake in it.

cardinal watching the birds from the feeder
It’s late in the day. This cardinal has found the tray empty, but waits for it to refill as it must do magically if he only waits long enough. The magic is someone tromping out with more sunflower seeds.

These trays and dishes are collected at dark every evening and brought into the house. Night forays by raccoons and opossums are not welcome as they make a mess on the main feeder floor.

In the morning, the birds gather in neighboring trees and the feeder tray and roof to wait. Sometimes a squirrel comes early to check over the spilled seeds. The bird seed arrives shortly after dawn.

Squirrel on bird feeder
Squirrels on the bird feeder are annoying and little gluttons. This gray squirrel stays to one side so birds can come by on the other one. Some sit in the middle and chase off birds and squirrels alike.

Watching the Birds

Some birds are regulars all year, as the feeder is put out all year. Cardinals and morning doves are the main ones. The other visitors vary by the season.

Winter brings the titmice, chickadees, nuthatches and house finches. The others are more in evidence then too. Downy and red-bellied woodpeckers eat the suet. Blue jays attack the corn in the scratch feed. Doves like the milo.

red-bellied woodpecker facing morning dove
The red-bellied woodpeckers generally hop around the outside of the feeder until they get to the suet cake. Still, the morning dove finds him intimidating and tried to insist he go away.

Squirrels come too. Gray squirrels are sometimes good visitors by sitting at one end of the sunflowers allowing the birds to eat at the other end. Some gray and all red or fox squirrels hog the tray.

Arguing with the squirrels is pointless. It’s easier to let them nibble up what they want and leave. Then the tray can be refilled for the birds and we can get back to watching the birds for the afternoon.

More about feeding the birds is in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.

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GKP Writing News

Novel Writing Time

December brings the end of a calendar year. Perhaps January starts off that year you plan to use for novel writing.

You know. That idea you’ve kicked around for years saying someday you will write a novel or a memoir – something.

phot idea for novel writing time
When I began writing “Dora’s Story”, the entire premise of the book unrolled for me in a short time of thinking about telling the story of a girl and her goat. But the link between goats and their owners was nothing new. I saw it at the Phelps County Fair getting pictures for “Goat Games”. This is a young Oberhasli doe with her proud owner.

Bad Reason for Novel Writing

You’re tired of your day job. Writing can make you a fortune. All you need to do is write that best seller.

Over a million new books are published every year. The chances of a debut novel becoming that gold mine are so slim it would take a microscope to see them.

Dora's Story novel writing time introduced Emily and Dora
As I developed the plot, Dora’s Story became a novel in six parts. The first one introduced Emily and Dora.

Good Reason for Novel Writing

There is that idea you can’t ignore. It’s a plot or a character or a wish to tell your family who you are and where you came from.

This thing is there when you wake up, whenever you stop during the day and puts you to sleep at night. It’s begging you to write it.

Dora's Story ending
As Dora moves from owner to owner and Emily searches for her, years go by. This brought in another aspect of novel writing: time passage. Finally, Dora ends up with Shawn.

Getting Ready

First, you will need a time to write. It can be the half hour before you go to bed or when you get up. Perhaps it is while you eat lunch.

Different people are most awake and ready to write at different times. Find that time for yourself and try to write then. If nothing else, write down notes so you can use them for writing later.

Second, you will need a place to write. This doesn’t need to be fancy or a whole room. It can be just enough room for your notebook or your laptop.

One essential thing in this place is being able to turn off the email, the phone, the interruptions for that bit of time. Once you start novel writing, you want to finish the thought you are working on and interruptions will make it fly out the window often to never return.

Barbara Rissler, Price o'the Field Nubians, with a Nubian doe. Love of goats continues.
I could see how much Barbara Rissler loved her Nubians as I visited her while writing Goat Games. In Dora’s Story, Emily searches for several years and her love for Dora keeps her going. In the end, she must make hard decisions about Dora.

Most Importantly

This novel writing is for you, no one else. Yes, readers matter once the novel is done, but the writing is for you.

And expect that first draft to stink. That’s what rewriting fixes.

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Reading Picture Books

This year I’ve been reading a lot of picture books. This has given me a lot of ideas about writing my own.

Yes, I have written a few of my own (“Waiting for Fairies”, “The Little Spider” and “At the Laundromat”) as well as collaborating on “Ducks Love Hats”. However, new ideas help with planning new ones because writing picture books is fun and challenging.

Reading picture books can be different
In “The Little Spider” I used the text to mimic how the little spider goes up various things only to come back down with the text doing the same.

Planning Picture Book Text

Books for adults are little more than text. Picture books are mostly about the pictures. The amount of text can vary from none to a short story with illustrations.

Reading picture books without text
“Ducks Love Hats” has no text so the illustrations must tell the story. These are challenging to create, but can get a child’s imagination to work.

If there is no or very little text, the illustrations must tell the story. I like this approach and often try to use it. A number of authors do this.

“Wolf in the Snow”, “Tuesday” and Mr. Wuffles” are good examples of picture books with no text. Another technique is used in “The Most Boring Book Ever” where the text and the illustrations tell related stories. The stories give lots of play to a child’s imagination, although the illustrations do have a narrative sequence.

A baby goat kid used as a model for a picture book
I work from photographs when I do illustrations for a picture book. Two projects start with baby kids so I have pictures of baby kids.

Other picture books are really stories with pictures. These stories can be read without the illustrations and do well. The illustrations only back up the tale.

Most picture books fall in between these. Some, like ones by Jan Brett, can combine the two. Her main story is an illustrated one. Her sidebars can tell another story than is related to the main one.

Another goat kid pose
It can be hard to get perspective right so I use many pictures from many angles. The different kids over the years give me a lot of material to work from.

Picture Book Illustrations

Reading picture books shows what a wide range the illustrations can have. They can be little more than line drawings with color to illustrations good enough to hang in an art gallery.

The youngest readers haven’t had an art education yet and so accept this wide range easily. They can even help the readers develop an appreciation of various art styles.

Highly detailed illustrations can encourage the reader to study them to find all the details. Doing this makes the reader slow down and actually see the illustration instead of glancing over it.

What Will I Do?

I’m not sure yet. With my first two picture books, the text came first and the illustrations were planned to show the text. In the book about Agate, I have no text yet. All I see are the illustrations.

Reading Picture Books

One thing reading many of these books does tell the writer is that each one is approached separately. Even those part of a series with a standard illustrative approach must be done separately to become a successful book.

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Getting Garden Seeds

My favorite wish books are arriving: the seed catalogs. The pictures are gorgeous. The varieties are tempting. In a month I will be getting garden seeds.

After drooling over the seed catalogs, it’s time to settle down into some serious garden planning. Getting garden seeds shouldn’t mean a pile of unopened packets sitting in the seed box for years.

Getting Seeds catalogs
Although Pinetree and Baker’s Creek are the main two companies I order from now, I have ordered from Shumway, Gurney’s, Jung’s and Johnny’s among others.

Serious Garden Planning

I do have a fair sized garden. However, it is finite. Mature plants take up space and don’t do well crammed in making both growing and harvesting difficult.

Every year I start with a garden diagram and a list of must grows. These are penciled into various beds. Leftover spots can be filled in with other plants.

My garden diagram needed before getting seeds
The main garden is roughly 50 feet square with the front section 16 feet square. This is not really accurate or entirely to scale. This does not matter as the only purpose is to let me decide what will be planted where.

Before going wild with the order form, there is another consideration: What will be done with the crop? Why purchase and grow a crop no one will eat?

My garden is in the Ozarks. Growing conditions aren’t the same as other places. Plants get hit with heat, humidity, flood and drought. Lots of vegetables don’t do well under these conditions.

Wild consumers are another consideration for me. Although we love eating sweet corn, I never grow it. The raccoons move in and demolish the crop and I refuse to camp out in the patch with a gun every night until it is picked.

Maturation time is important too. Tomatoes taking over three months to mature a crop are not on my list. Cabbage and other cole crops must mature before the weather gets too hot in summer or too cold in late fall.

Back to the Catalogs

Once the planning is done, it’s time for getting garden seeds picked out and ordered. My orders go in the first week of January as those leek and cabbage seeds need to be started by February.

My spring garden is a going concern already with garlic and onions. The cabbage (Savoy preferably) and leeks go into the garden in March. I have almost three months to get ready.

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Sweat Shirt Time for Goats

Ozark winters have gotten erratic and mostly warmer. However, the cold decided to visit for Thanksgiving. Shivering goats made it sweat shirt time.

Animals do put on extra winter undercoats. Nubians don’t do so as much as they are descended from tropic goats. When it gets cold and stays cold, they huddle together and shiver.

Being Cold

Some people don’t seem to mind winter cold. I am not one of them. When it gets cold, I huddle near the fire and/or wrap up in a blanket. Triple layers help when I go to the barn.

My Nubian goats can’t enjoy a hot wood stove. If they are cold, I get less milk. When they stay cold, they can get sick and have a harder time recovering.

Up North

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan winter brings temperatures below zero and deep snow. People wear wool to keep warm.

We bought old wool blankets at the thrift store, cut them in half and tied them on our goats. They weren’t thrilled, but they were warm locked in their barn. The blankets stayed on.

Nubian doe High Reaches Lydia in her winter wear
Sweat shirts may not be Nubian doe Lydia’s favorite wear, but it does keep her a little warmer during winter cold spells.

In the Ozarks

The temperature has plunged below zero here for a night or two. One winter brought foot deep snow. But these are not the usual winter weather routine.

We tried tying blankets on the goats to warm them up. They decided the blankets were itchy. The baling twine was too tight. The blankets landed in heaps on the floor and trampled.

Sweat Shirt Time

The goats still got cold. People wear sweat shirts to get warm. Why couldn’t the goats?

So now, when winter cold moves in and the goats begin shivering, it’s sweat shirt time. My herd sports a variety of colors, stops shivering and finds them comfortable enough to keep on until the weather warms up again.

Learn about goats while solving puzzles in “Goat Games“.

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My Reading Goal

Bleak December, the last month of the year has arrived. With all the hustle and bustle, there are so many things to wrap up. My reading goal is one.

This year started looking like a normal year. I set a goal of 72 books. Then disaster arrived.

My Goats

My ten-year-old buck, High Reaches Silk’s Augustus, got sick. It was terminal and I had to say good-bye. His pen looked so forlorn.

Dairy goats must have kids to continue to give milk. Terrill Creek Huckleberry came home. He was a love, just a wonderful buck. Somewhere he found and ate something poisonous and died.

Then my beloved Agate got sick. No matter what I did, she kept getting worse. When she finally collapsed, unable to stand, I had to say good-bye to her too.

Nubian doe High Reaches Agate in pasture
Nubian doe High Reaches Pixie’s Agate was a good friend. If I called the goats out in pasture, she led them in. She stopped on the way out for neck and ear scratches. I miss her.

My Family

My goats are my family. They have been my companions through several moves and over fifty years. All of them are special. Three have been extra special: Jennifer, my first goat; Bridget, my traveling companion; and Agate, my bottle baby.

Reading and writing almost ceased for months. That leaves me now, in December, seventeen books away from my set goal.

Making the Goal

I do read fairly fast, especially light fiction. But not that fast. At present I have just finished “First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives” by Margaret Truman. This is a wonderful look at the job of being First Lady and how many different approaches by women of so many different backgrounds did this job.

Three books are ongoing. “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” is one I read as a child. It is very much a portrait of growing up poor around 1900, although it is fiction. “Arsene Lupin Gentleman Thief” was mentioned in “The Cat Who Saved the Library” along with “Moby Dick” (read the abridged version!) and “The Three Musketeers”.

Third is “Of Time and Turtles”. This is a fascinating look at turtle rescue and turtles. These creatures have existed for 350 million years, yet modern humans may destroy these special, unique animals by greed, carelessness and ignorance.

If all else fails, I suppose I can count picture books. I read and review (on my Goodreads blog) about six a week. I do hate to not make my reading goal.

When I finish reading a book, I do a review on Goodreads. The picture books are reviewed on my Goodreads blog.

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Timing in Writing

Timing is so important in a novel. I forgot that when I wrote about Ship 18. Now I have done the math and must change most of the plot.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
This novel was my first real brush with timing. It took place over several years with several events repeating over the years with people and goats growing older. And I lost a year. Putting that year back in was a big mess.

Originally

The premise was of a space ship dropping out of a worm tunnel somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. The ship must cross much of the solar system to get to Earth which they call Cardua.

Of course crossing over the Sun would be the most exciting time of the novel and I gave it big play. But it had no basis other than my imagination.

Doing the Math

I had looked up the planetary distances, orbits, sizes etc. before beginning. Looking them up doesn’t mean I paid much attention to them, although I should have.

Finally, I sat down and did the math. I knew the size of the ship (30 inches long) and figured a speed (5 million miles a day). Starting at Earth, I calculated where the ship would be each 6 day week (The Carduans have three fingers and count by sixes.).

My guess work was so far off, it was ludicrous. Since timing is everything in this novel, I had to redo everything according to the calculated journey.

Big Solar System

When I taught science, I took a class outside to a long sidewalk. We marked out distances to the planets on it. I guess I forgot just how big the solar system is.

My Ship 18, on its fictional journey, would spend most of the 15 weeks getting from its original position to Earth’s orbit, although Earth would still be on the other side of the Sun. Anyone who has ever been on a long journey riding along knows how boring this can be.

And now all the exciting events in the first draft are relegated to the last few weeks. Instead, I have eleven weeks of boredom to fill up. But, timing is everything in this novel.

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Winter Seeds

Wildflowers are gone. Most trees are bare. Is there anything to see on a nature walk? Perhaps winter seeds can provide a guessing game.

Elephant Foot Seeds
Elephant foot sends up flower stalks almost two feet. The pink flowers are interesting to look at. Then winter comes. The stalks turn dry and brown, but are recognizable.

What Is This?

A bare stalk sticks up with a crown of pointy seeds on the top. There are no leaves or flowers to give a clue to which flowers produced these seeds.

Thinking back, I know what this is. There were big leaves and pink flowers with petals like fingers in little boats on top of stems.

This is elephant’s foot in winter. There are lots of these stalks so there might be lots of plants next year.

Buckbrush or coral berry fruits
Buckbrush spreads underground. It’s flowers are small bells. Then the red berries show up. These are supposed to be good wild bird fruits. They are not considered edible by people, just something colorful to see in early winter.

Looking For Clues to Winter Seeds

One good clue is remembering what flowers I saw in this place last summer. This narrows the list of possibles a lot as spring ephemerals and plants not found here are eliminated.

Leaves might be a clue. Sometimes a few green ones are left. Usually there are some dead, brown ones. It takes care to uncurl a dry leaf.

The shape of the seed head is another clue. Monarda flowers leave behind a ball with pockets where the seeds were. These are called beebalm and horsemint commonly.

Fruit is another clue. The persimmon trees often have a few persimmons still hanging on. These are shriveled and dry, but definitely persimmons.

Buckbrush has long stems lined with clusters of red berries. These dry and shrivel and turn dark after a time. I read that lots of birds like them, but I think they are a last choice on the menu.

Tall Goldenrod seed head
Tall goldenrod seed heads look like little, fuzzy hats perched on top of brown stems.

Why Bother?

Cold winter walks can be more about exercise than looking at plants. The faster the walk, the sooner the return to warmth.

Overwintering bees and caterpillars or pupae value these winter seeds and stalks. They hide inside them or under those fallen leaves to survive the cold. That’s fine for them.

For me, I like having an idea where to look for various wildflowers next year. Those winter seeds give me clues.

There is much to look at during an Ozark winter. Some of it is in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.