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

Persimmons Are Falling

Fall may still rule here in the Ozarks, but its grip is weakening. The black walnuts are carpeting the ground making walking a challenge. And the persimmons are falling to the delight of the goats.

fallen persimmon
Persimmons must be ripe to taste good. Then they are delicious. The marks of a ripe persimmon are a nice orange color, wrinkled skin and soft feel.

Lazy Summer

Horseflies kept the goats lazing about in the barn most of the day all summer. These biting demons like it hot and sunny. They don’t come into a dark barn.

Around here these insects come in several varieties from the housefly lookalike stable flies to deer flies to half inch horseflies to inch long terrors. Being bitten by one of these is like being stabbed with a hot needle.

My small Nubian herd dozed the day away. I put out hay so they could get up and snack. Getting water meant risking the horseflies.

It’s not safe to put buckets of water in the barn. By the time it’s half empty, one goat or two will knock it over. Then the chickens fill it with straw and manure.

persimmons are falling, goats are racing to the trees
My Nubian goats amble out the pasture gate and shift down to the end of the barn lot. Violet is usually first to start off with Spring right behind her to take over the lead in a mad dash across the pasture to the first persimmon tree.

Fall Arrives

Cool weather meant the horseflies and their ilk subsided. The goats kept up their lazy ways. They waited until I led them out sometime in the afternoon.

Then the goats discovered the persimmons are falling. These are delicious goat candy. The first goat under the tree gets the most.

Now I go out to the barn after lunch (Mornings are writing time.) and find only the chickens are in residence. Cleaning out the barn is much easier. Making the rounds of the hay troughs looking for eggs is easier.

persimmons are falling, delighting the goats
First to arrive under the persimmon trees is first to find the fruit. Nubian goats love persimmons, will eat them until they get upset stomachs.

Goat Treats

The persimmons are falling in the yard too. Walking to the barn now entails searching under the yard tree and collecting persimmons. They become dessert placed on the grain at milking time.

All of the goats, even Kingpin, eat dessert first.

Goats are fun to write about. For a wild romp of a tale, check out “Capri Capers”.

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GKP Writing News

Used To Be

So much has happened here at High Reaches since I finished writing “My Ozark Home” leaving the book more nostalgia than reality. As is often true with nostalgia, I miss the place as it used to be.

cover for "My Ozark Home" by Karen GoatKeeper
The five years since this book was written have brought many changes to High Reaches. That doesn’t change the beauty I saw when selecting the photographs for the book.

The Creek

When I was teaching, there was a big aquarium set  up as a creek riffle. It had darters, broadhead minnows, crayfish, snails living in it. Those things do still try to live in the creek now, but it is a never ending challenge.

Floods have washed out the banks leaving cliffs along the edges. The small ones are about eighteen inches, but many are over two feet. Deep pools are now moved to other places .

Crossing the creek to the pastures and hills on the other side used to be easy. It is still possible to get across on foot. The tractor can not cross so the hay fields are growing up in brush.

ruined bridge
The planks are now wired onto the I-beams so, we hope, floods won’t wash so many away. The goats carefully walk down to the single plank to get onto the bridge planks and off the two planks at the other end. Most of the goats do. Pest and Rose prefer to cross the creek even with the bank being so steep.

The Bridge

There was no bridge across the creek when we moved here. We put one in using cement pillars and I-beams with planks across it. The goats, us, the tractor could all go across.

The bridge is still there – sort of. One end has been shifted and sunk. Careful placement of planks makes it possible to get across for the goats and us for now.

As the banks continue to wash away, the distance to what is left of the bridge gets greater. Another flood or two and the planks won’t reach anymore.

Old Landmarks

The pile of old stumps is almost gone. Many of the big trees, especially ones along the creek, have fallen.

Not all is gloom. The pawpaw trees are now tall. In a good year, the kitchen overflows with their fruit.

New plants have moved in to replace some that have disappeared. There are times I find even these in new places.

Still, as we have gotten old, the place has gotten old. I’m glad to have my book to remind me of the way the place used to be.

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Latest From High Reaches

Goldenrods Are Blooming

In spite of the drought many wildflowers are trying to put on a show along the roads here in the Ozarks. Goldenrods are blooming with their bright yellow making them hard to miss.

Downy Goldenrods are blooming
I stopped because of another goldenrod and found this Downy goldenrod right beside it. The reflexed bits under the flower heads make this one easy to identify as the only other one like this is very hairy. The rays on these flower heads are very long and showy.

How Many?

It’s easy to say goldenrod and give the impression there is only one. Driving by it’s also easy to think these yellow blurs are all the same.

They are not. Four goldenrods are blooming now and several have finished. As I try to get something done on my Dent County Flora, I’m taking pictures of some.

The picture taking is the easy part. Identifying the different ones is the hard part. Several look a lot alike. Luckily the four in bloom now are easier.

Hairy Goldenrods are blooming
Most goldenrods have big, branched flower tips. This is one Hairy Goldenrod, doesn’t. It is a single stalk with clumps of flower heads from the leaf nodes. The stalk is stiff. The rays are small and there are no recurved bits under the flower heads.

One Patch Missing

For years I would take pictures of the Tall goldenrod blooming just down the road. The road grader scraped that section away and none grew there this year. There are some along the road to town, but I miss the little patch. Orange day lilies are taking over that spot.

However, three others are still found along the road on the walk to the river. I do have several books to help me identify them. Unfortunately, I don’t really understand the descriptions with all the botanical terms.

My main way is through drawings and pictures, both in the books and at missouriplants.com. The flowerhead arrangements are different on the different kinds. The leaves are too.

Rough Goldenrods are blooming
Rough Goldenrods are smaller plants. they like to grow on roadside banks and nod over them. In a good year I will see these drooping out along a long stretch of roadside. They like lots of sun, although their bright color rivals it.

Other Roadside Attractions

Yes, the goldenrods are blooming. Their yellow is so attractive. They are not the only wild flowers along the road.

This is aster season. New England purple and gold, spreading blue, heath white are some of the colors. There are several blue lavender asters and several white heath asters.

White snakeroot, yellow brown-eyed Susans, sweet everlasting and thistles are wrapping up their time. The trees may not be in fall colors yet, but the roadsides are.

More about wild flowers can be found in my book Exploring the Ozark Hills.

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Latest From High Reaches

Molting Time

Feathers litter my hen house floor, the chicken yard, the free range area, everywhere I look. Several of the chickens look like refugees from a feather factory.

There’s nothing wrong with my chickens or the rest of the wild birds. Fall is molting time, the time when old, ragged feathers are replaced with new ones.

Easter Egger hen molting
My Easter Egger Pippi is usually a sleek grey with a proud tail. Right now she is covered with feathers dropping off and new feathers starting to grow in. She likes to spend the day in the milk room picking up the grain the goats drop.

Examining Feathers

One of the first things I notice about all of these feathers is how different many look. Of course, there are the usual ones with their long, central shaft. These are the ones in pictures as they were used to make quill pens.

Molting time is quill time
Chicken wing feathers aren’t very big, but they are big enough to make a model quill pen. The white wing feather is from a smaller pullet. The brown quill is from an adult chicken. The first is from the front of a wing as the uneven sides show. The other is from lower down on the wing or, possibly, the tail.

Chicken quills can make small pens, but goose quills and, especially swan quills were the preferred choice. Quills are wing feathers.

When I use fingers to smooth these ragged feathers, they try to lock together again to form the wing feather they are supposed to be. Tiny hooks or barbs lock together to zip the pieces into place.

Other Feathers

Chicken down feathers
It’s hard to find nice down feathers. All that fluff sticks to bits of dirt, leaves and other things. Being fluffy, it’s hard to get this debris out of the down. These are very soft feathers.

Other feathers are soft with the side pieces branched and puffy. These are down. Chicken down could be used in pillows, I suppose. Duck and goose down is preferred. Just as in jackets and comforters, down is used to keep a bird warm.

Down only works if it is kept dry. Body feathers do this job. These resemble down at the base, but have a top more like wing feathers at the top, only softer. Lots of these overlap over the bird’s body.

Lots of chicken body feathers blow across the yard during molting time
The amount of down on a chicken’s body feather can vary. The top sections should hook together, but these old ones don’t do it well.

Tail Feathers

Tail feathers can be very elaborate and showy. My roosters have long tail feathers. I did find one, but it was very ragged. Peacock ones are prized for decorations. Every once in a while I will find a turkey tail feather off on the hills. Molting time is a good time to go looking.

Molting Time Problem

Making feathers takes lots of protein and energy. My chickens are using their food to make up their new feathers which will make them look gorgeous.

There is little food left over to make eggs. Shorter days add to this and older chickens will often take a winter holiday lasting to the end of January.

My pullets are taking up the slack. Their eggs may be small, but I still have eggs in the kitchen.

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Latest From High Reaches

Rough Green Snake

Exercise is the main reason for walking up and down my road now. It is so dry few flowers are blooming and everything is covered with dust. Then I came across a rough green snake.

Both of us were surprised. The snake froze hoping I would keep on walking. I stopped to admire this lovely snake.

Rough Green Snake
At about two feet long, this is as big as this rough green snake will get. The color is spectacular.

What is a Rough Green Snake?

The easiest way of knowing this snake is its spring green color. These aren’t big snakes, only growing to around two feet which this one was. They are very slender. This one was only as fat as a fat pencil.

These snakes eat things like grasshoppers. They are not poisonous. It’s rare to see one any place other than when one basks out on the road and that is rare.

High Reaches Snakes

Although rough green snakes are one of my favorite colors, they are not necessarily my favorite snake. They live out along the creek or up in the hills.

Midland Brown and Ring Neck snakes live in my garden. They are much smaller and eat the slugs, snails and other unwanted garden pests. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to eat stink bugs.

Speckled King snakes do visit now and then. It is always a treat to see these enemies of rats and mice. They tend to stay near the barn or in the pastures.

Yes, copperheads live here too. A pair was living under my barn floor this summer. I would see them from time to time as they went hunting for mice.

Although copperheads are poisonous, they are also very shy. Lots of other creatures eat them. Their bite is fatal for a chicken, but they are too big to attract much attention from these voracious birds. Goats swell up, hurt for a day or two and then are fine.

Black rat snakes are a mixed blessing. These rid the barn of a burrowing rat invasion and keep it free of these varmints. But these snakes love hen eggs and summer is an egg race for whether I or the snakes get to the eggs first.

Round Pupil is nonpoisonous
Nonpoisonous snakes like this rough green snake indicate it is nonpoisonous. Poisonous snakes have rectangular pupils. Zooming in with a camera from several feet away is the best way to spot this.

Interesting Creatures

My fear of snakes has gradually waned as I have observed these allies in the fight against mice and garden pests. We now have a truce. They are welcome to live here. We will say hello from time to time and go our separate ways.

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GKP Writing News

Writing About Goats

My High Reaches Nubian goat herd keeps getting smaller. Although this is intentional, it isn’t easy. One way of coping is writing about goats.

Last June marked fifty-one years Nubian dairy goats have been a part of my life. Losing them will put a big hole in it as they are my milk source, my manure and mulch source, my friends.

Writing About Goats Isn’t New

My first book, “Goat Games”, was about goats. More books with goats in them followed: “Dora’s Story”; “Capri Capers”; “Hopes, Dreams and Reality”; and “For Love of Goats”.

When I wrote these, goats were in them because they fit well. I was writing about something I was familiar with. It’s different now.

Now, when I am writing about goats, I am remembering them. It keeps them in my life, even as they fade from my barn.

High Reaches Nubian dairy goat herd
At one time High Reaches had over 40 goats in the herd. Now it is down to ten counting Kingpin.

Opal and Agate: Partners in Adventure

Both Opal and Agate are real goats. Only Opal is still in my herd. Their fictional counterparts are more than they have been. They are stand ins for the many kids that have been a part of my High Reaches herd over the years.

Kids are kids, whether they have four legs or two. Goat kids are cute – just check out some of the many videos and pictures online. That makes them good subjects for picture books.

Best Intentions

I started the year with six books to work on. None of them are done and the year is racing to a conclusion. Life got in the way as it likes to do.

“Ducks Love Hats” happened. I am working my way through the publishing steps with it now.

Ship Eighteen from The Carduan Chronicles was going well. I had plans to move on to Life’s Rules and finish that draft. Instead, there is a major problem with the Ship Eighteen draft. Correcting it will take careful planning and a major rewrite.

Sketches for the first Opal and Agate book are in my sketchpad. I hope I can get more of them done soon. I will, if life doesn’t get in my way again too soon.

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Latest From High Reaches

Exploring the Creek

Lately I seem trapped working in the garden everyday I am home and in spare minutes the other days. I needed a break and went off exploring the creek.

My Ozark Creek

One of the things we love and hate about this place is the creek. We hate it because it makes fencing impossible across it. It floods and destroys things, especially the last few years.

We love it for its beauty and its water. The goats use it for drinking water. We used it for washing off when we first moved here, before we moved into the house. Now it waters my garden during dry weather.

Exploring the Creek

Almost no rain has fallen here in a couple of months. The creek no longer really runs like a creek, but as a series of connected pools. Water still flows, but down below the gravel surface.

I walked down the dry creek bed dodging wet areas to find a nice pool to look in. Tiny minnows fled from my shadow as tall shadows usually mean someone wanting them for dinner.

Interesting rocks made walking challenging with their uneven sizes and tendency to roll when stepped on. Water striders plied the water surface of the pool I stopped at. Plants lined the steep banks. Nothing else seemed to be in the pool.

Hellgrammite seen exploring the creek
Hellgrammites are baby dragonflies. Like dragonflies, they are ferocious predators. This one was hidden below a rock. It stayed motionless out of the water hoping I wouldn’t eat it. These will bite, if you grab them.

Who Lives There?

Even though the pool looked empty except for the minnows, lots of creatures lived there. To find them I picked up the rocks and looked at the undersides and in the gravel under the rock. I found snails, water pennies, even a hellgrammite – larval dragonfly. There were larval horseflies too. I didn’t kill them, although that was tempting considering their attacks on the goats and me once they grow up.

Each rock was put back as I had found it. That way all the creatures were back where they belonged.

Exploring the creek may include crayfish
One important skill needed when exploring a creek is patience. Residents flee as people are big and may want them for dinner. To see ones like this crayfish aka crawdad you have to sit or stand motionless for what seems like ages.

Bigger Denizens

I know crayfish live in the creek. A darter was under one rock I picked up. But crayfish were no where, or were they? I waited. And waited. Finally, one crawled out from beneath some rocks.

It was time to leave. My garden needed watering.

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GKP Writing News

Arts Rolla Council Writing Contest

An email arrived a week or so ago announcing the Rolla Arts Council Biannual Writing Contest. I left it sitting there thinking I had nothing to enter. I’ve done very little serious writing the past couple of years, mostly picture books.

This is the only contest I do enter. Perhaps I should enter more, but they take time both to find and enter them and to write something to enter. The email stares at me several times a week.

Rolla Arts Council Writing Contest

There are three categories to enter: fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Although I do write haikus, these are not really useful for this contest. That leaves the two writing categories.

Both can be excerpts of longer projects. That’s fine. However, 3000 words isn’t very long, often not even a chapter. And I’ve entered previous contests with two of my novels I am working on already.

Possible Fiction Entry?

There is the one I am presently editing. It’s the second of the Carduan Chronicles on Ship Eighteen. Perhaps I can enter part of it. I even know which chapter, although I would need an explanatory paragraph for it. After all, the judge won’t know about the Carduans or, in this case, the ship’s journey.

The first chapter of the book on Ship Nineteen took second place. It would be nice if this entry in the series also took a place.

Character for Arts Rolla Council writing contest
Water striders are fun to watch skating across the water surface. Their feet have hairs holding air to keep them from sinking. These Ozark creek residents must be included in a picture book about exploring an Ozark creek.

Possible Nonfiction Entry?

I am working on picture books. These don’t normally work well without the illustrations and these are not part of the entry.

There is the Chemistry Project. Science activity books aren’t appropriate for the contest.

Perhaps I can start a different picture book, science based with more text than a traditional picture book. Topic? Perhaps a series of books ultimately about 100-inch hikes. The first one is about exploring my Ozark creek?

It is a place to start. With six projects already in progress, I really don’t need another one. But I do want a Rolla Arts Council Writing Contest entry. And I need reasons to take time off to go walking.

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GKP Writing News

Finishing “Ducks Love Hats”

Don’t let anyone tell you picture books are easy to write. All they are doing is showing how little they know about writing. And I really know this is true finishing “Ducks Love Hats”.

At First

There was no plan to really write a book in the lesson plans for Creating Picture Books. Even the original idea sounded flimsy, not nearly enough to fill 32 pages.

How could so few people even dream of creating a book? This was especially true as we only met four times formally. Still, we latched onto the dream.

Finally !

Every page of this little book took hours of work to complete. As these pages were assembled out of pieces done by class members, some of these pages took over 20 layers for the backgrounds, the ducks, the people and the hats.

I am slow with this. Each item had to be created, resized, added to the main page. Did it need to be above or below the other items? Those messy edges had to be erased.

"Ducks Love Hats" cover
Meet the cover of the new picture book “Ducks Love Hats”. It is illustrations only so you can make the tale as complex as you want. The book will be available by the end of September, 2025.

Covers and Title Page

I read around 200 picture books a year. They have a wide variety of illustration styles, many approaches to covers and title pages.

All the book collaborators decided on a color scheme, a title, illustrations. I began with the title page, except it worked better as the cover. What to do for the title page?

Perhaps I could repeat the cover which is sometimes done. However, a different design is better. The new design didn’t match the color scheme, so it changed.

Finishing “Ducks Love Hats”

When working on a book project, it’s easy for a writer to get so involved mistakes sneak in unnoticed. You see or read what you think should be there, even when it isn’t.

The final step is for other people to look the pages over. Then the book will truly be done.

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Latest From High Reaches

End of Summer

The end of summer arrived with a thud this year. Temperatures dropped. And the garlic chives began blooming.

Along the road the yellow ironweed is blooming. The first asters are blooming. Grass pollen is tickling the nose.

Garlic Chive flowers
When my garlic chive patch, all eight feet by ten feet of it, blooms, it looks like a field of snow. Once the sun warms it up, the insects move in and the hum can be heard all over the garden.

My Garlic Chive Patch

Many years ago my father gave me a pot of garlic chives. It was only a ten inch pot. It fit easily into a square foot of garden space.

This year my patch is close to eighty square feet. New patches keep showing up around the garden, in the lawn, along the edges of the lawn, wherever the birds dropped seeds. Their white flower umbels are easy to spot, not just for the color, but also for the hum surrounding the plants.

Bee Fly on Garlic Chive flowers
Although this insect looks a bit like a bee and might even sound like one, it is a fly. One way to tell is that it has only one set of flight wings. Bees have two. Sweet nectar attracts these insects as well as bees.

What Do You Do With Them?

All spring and summer I get this question. There must be some reason I allow this much good garden space to be covered with these plants.

I really don’t need this big of a patch. Sure, garlic chives are great in scrambled eggs, stir fries, mixed into soft cheese and relished by the goats. Still, half this patch would be more than enough.

Buckeye Butterflies on Garlic Chive flowers
Buckeye butterflies are easy to spot with the many eyes on their wings. These are enjoying nectar from my garlic chive patch.

End of Summer Beauty

Late August is the highlight of the garlic chive year. Snowy white flowers open and send out the message they are open for business. The pollinators arrive.

Small and large bumblebees, honeybees, several kinds of wasps, beetles, a variety of butterflies, bee flies, native bees move in creating a hum easy to hear all over the garden. They are so busy with the flowers I can walk through the edges and be totally ignored.

Along with the pollinators come the spiders. Webs appear. Flower spiders lurk.

Winter and lean times are coming for these creatures. This is a good chance for them to finish raising their over wintering queens or store up honey.

I really don’t need all of these garlic chives. However, this end of summer chives makes it worthwhile to have my patch.