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

Novel Boring Times

It’s happening in my Mindy novel: novel boring times. The run up to the storm and the storm had happenings every day. Now comes the clean up.

Mindy is all alone. The road is washed out. The phone and electricity are out. Water is in short supply. The fences are down and need to be repaired.

So Mindy’s days become much alike: checking for the road crew repairing the road and repairing fences. After one description, this is boring.

I suppose I could toss in a few snakes, broken posts, snapping chain. It’s still the same old stuff over and over. Clear the debris off the fence, back the tractor to the post, attach the chain, ease the tractor forward to pull the post back up, tap the post with the sledge hammer to secure it, release the chain and move on to the next post.

Novel boring times. They bore the writer. They bore the reader.

Novel boring times can use friendly faces like Nubian goats
Mindy is isolated from the human world, but not her place. She has her cat, her chickens and her goats to keep her company. Sometimes telling your animals about a problem helps you make sense of it.

This is an important time. Mindy has lots of decisions to think about and make. Thinking is really hard when a person is bone tired.

There is the livestock. Most of the routines were written about already. Little is changing other than not doing chores in the rain.

Up until now the novel has gone one day at a time. In these novel boring times, do I continue to do a day-by-day account, only hitting a few highlights? Or do I lump several days together?

And right after these pages comes lots of happenings. Writing advice sometimes says to write these events first and fill in the other later. It’s tempting.

My problem is me. If I write the end of the book, it will be that much harder to come back and fill in these novel boring times. I will be impatient and skimp.

Boring as these days are, they are important. Skimping will break the flow of the novel. Off to do the drudgery writing telling myself the novel will be worth it.

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Latest From High Reaches

Balancing Wants and Needs

As I grow older, I do seem to sneak more wants into my life. Balancing wants and needs is not just denying purchases, it’s an ever-changing way of looking at your life.

Going to bed hungry makes going to sleep difficult. Eating an evening snack like a handful of potato chips helps. When I’m running too late or too tired to cook, having frozen dinners works.

Could I do without these? Yes. But denying all wants isn’t good. A small piece of any budget should be what was called mad money, money to be spent on whims. Note the word small.

Driving

Gas prices are coming down a little. That will ease my budget a little. There are other ways to help too.

Separating wants from needs includes separating necessary and unnecessary trips to town. My drive to town is nearly half an hour. When added to time to dress for town and change back to farm clothes plus time to get whatever, that’s an afternoon. What else could that time have been spent on?

Homestead ‘To Do’ lists are endless. Repairs, chores, gardening and more never get done completely.

Trips to town are done with lists of things to get done. It makes for hectic trips, but only one day covers a lot of territory. I make three trips to town every week, but one is on the wants list much of the time.

Oops. Wants? The idea is to reduce the wants, isn’t it? But it goes back to balancing wants and needs. Working seven days a week wears a person down. I now take one day to sell at Farmers Market, if the garden is producing and the woodchucks are not around (four this year, so far), followed by an afternoon hiking away from thoughts of chores and work needing done.

taking personal time helps in balancing wants and needs
Homesteading is work. Chores, repairs and more constantly vie for attention. It’s easy to fall into a routine of working all day, every day until you hate to get up in the morning. Maybe that moves taking some personal time away from the wants to the needs column. My get away is hiking at ShawneeMac Lakes Conservation Area ond afternoon a week. I do plead guilty to taking plant pictures, but that is as much fun as work. The work part comes later downloading, sorting and using the pictures.

And it’s important to have a little slack in your life and budget.

Budget

Everything seems to be rooted in money. Making it. Spending it.

For the homesteader with limited funds, separating wants and needs on a budget is very important. And having that budget is essential.

Over my life I’ve had jobs paying daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. It is so tempting to skip making and keeping to a budget, just pay as you go. Until the bills mount up to more than your income.

A budget doesn’t lock you up financially. It frees you up, out from the pressure of owing, paying late fees, the spiral of debt that’s so hard to climb out of.

Making a budget isn’t hard. Start with two lists. One is headed income. The other is headed expenses.

If income exceeds expenses, you are in good shape. It expenses exceed income, you are in trouble. Either the income must increase or the expenses must shrink.

And that’s where we started: balancing wants and needs.

This is the third in this series of posts on homestead finances. The first was Telling Wants From Needs. The second was on Separating Wants and Needs.

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Latest From High Reaches

Separating Wants From Needs

I’ve lived a simple, what most people call a simple, life for close to fifty years now. I have become an anachronism. Separating wants from needs has become so ingrained, I cringe looking at shopping carts in the stores.

This is the second post on this topic. The first is on Telling Wants From Needs from last week.

Food

I am addicted to eating as are all the people I know. The smart homesteader will plan a garden to supply food all year. This isn’t as simple as it sounds for lots of reasons.

There are some foods easy to grow that I just don’t like. Green beans come to mind. The only reason for me to grow green beans is to sell them. What do I do with the ones that don’t sell?

I grow crops we will and do eat. Yard long beans can be used like green beans and I like the flavor. And I put up the extra peppers, squash (Frozen summer squash is a great soup base.) and tomatoes to use next winter.

separating wants from needs can include growing squash for food
These Zephyr summer squash are useful to the homesteader several ways. One is food. Second is a product to sell. Third is soup or stew stock for next winter. Successful squash plants need frequent squash bug checks and a shovelful of compost under the hill.

One of the things not done here is eating out. I cook. That doesn’t mean I never use frozen meals, but they are rare. Take out buffet can have vegetables added and make meals for more than one day.

Skipping most snack foods and sodas has side benefits. One is saving money. The other is better health.

For me caffeine, most white flour and sugar are not options. Weaning away from these food drugs, and they are drugs, does have withdrawal challenges. For around two weeks not even you will want to know you. You will feel terrible and grouch at everything. If you stick it out, things do get better.

I used to read book about pioneers and wonder how they could get by on five pounds of sugar for a year. I opened a bag last November. Half of it is still in the canister. Cakes, cookies and other desserts are not on the menu except for special occasions.

Side benefits of this are having less tarter on the teeth, fewer calories to burn off and finding food actually tastes good. Mentioning those fewer calories matters as a person gets older. Your metabolism slows down meaning you need less food. And those extra pounds get a lot harder to shed.

okra is a good crop
I grow three varieties of okra, Burgundy, Jing and a green variety (Burmese is preferred). Each one has a different flavor and degree of slime. Many people don’t like okra as it tends to be slimy. That slime thickens soups. It can sell well as it is an unusual crop at Farmers Market.

Clothes

When I was teaching, students were so concerned with their clothes. Sometimes they seemed more concerned with their clothes than with their education. They were more focused on rating what other people were wearing than on what they were putting into their minds.

And ten years down the road, those clothes mean nothing. The education is what opens doors to your life.

My goats are not worried about my clothes. They don’t care if I show up in jeans or shorts or fancy slacks as long as they get to eat. My chickens are the same.

Jeans last me about three months before I’ve worn holes in the knees. Those holes may be the fashion in some places, not here. Thrift store, here I come. Out come the scissors and cut the legs to length.

These won’t do for town, so I do have a town wardrobe. But this is simple. Most of the clothes have lasted for years. Forget the latest fashions. They are only a way to get you to spend more money.

I guess it’s time to close for this week. Separating wants from needs seems to cover more territory than I anticipated. Which is strange as it is so normal for me. Continued next week.

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GKP Writing News

Dent County Flora Books

I started taking wildflower pictures when I got my first digital camera. That was when I wrote Nature Notes for the Kaleidoscope, a local ad paper. These first morphed into “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and now are the basis for my Dent County Flora books.

Plants are interesting subjects to photograph. The best part is that they don’t disappear while I am setting my camera up. I can also get up close to most of them. (Water plants, stinging nettles etc. are given space.)

If you haven’t looked at plants much, you should. They come in a wide range of sizes, colors, scents and uses.

Plants are usually some shade of green. Indian Pipe, Pinesap and Coral Orchids aren’t green.

Wildflowers range from less than an eighth of an inch across to six inches around here. Some don’t have petals. Flowering dogwoods have white bracts (special leaves) with yellow green flowers in the center.

Dent County Flora books photograph of nodding spurge flower
Notice my finger tip compared to this flower. Many flowers are very small and difficult to photograph. There are two flowers in this picture. The white, four petal one is the male producing pollen. Below it is the green female with pistil sticking out. This plant is the Nodding Spurge, Euphorbia nutans, and will be in Dent County Whites.

Wanting to know what these plants were named, I needed several pictures of each. The flower, the back of the flower, the leaf, under the leaf, the stem, the fruit or seedpod and the plant adds up into a lot of photographs. And more than one of each thing is a good idea.

Every year I took more photographs and stored them. The stash got bigger and bigger, filling a 16GB key, then a second one. I hate having them sit unused.

An ulterior motive was an excuse to go hiking. This would add even more photographs to my stash.

A second motive was a challenge. How many kinds of plants could I find and identify? This had to be in my county as the goats keep me close to home.

Enter the Dent County Flora books. My list of plants found in Dent County has some 2000 plants on it. One book will not work. So there are the Dent County Blues, the Dent County Reds, the Dent County Whites, the Dent County Greens etc.

Will I ever find them all? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s enjoyable looking for the plants, getting the pictures and creating the pages of my Dent County Flora books.

I have assembled some pages from the Dent County Blues into a pdf found here.

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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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Latest From High Reaches

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.