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

Growing Savoy Cabbage

Cabbage is not a big favorite for meals at my house. Brussels sprouts, broccoli and spinach are much preferred. So the Savoy cabbage remained a pretty picture in the seed catalog.

Regular cabbage is a fairly smooth ball of ribbed, green leaves. It likes colder weather and will take frost. Hot weather makes it turn bitter. I put in a few plants in the spring, but mostly put them in for a fall crop.

Temptation

The regular cabbage came as transplants appearing the first of April or thereabouts. There were four plants in a pack.

Savoy cabbage was not available as transplants. In fact, most people in my area have never heard of it.

Every year I thumbed past the cabbage seed offers and stopped to admire the crinkled leaves in this picture. This year I ordered a packet just because.

Seed Starting Headaches

Usually I only start seeds for tomatoes and peppers and similar summer crops. These go into pots about the middle of March.

Cabbage likes cold weather. It needs to be in the ground in March. That means starting the seeds in January.

January seedlings, like all seedlings, need light. A warm sunny porch will not be available. I bought a grow light.

Two trays of cabbage and leek seedlings meant one tray under in the morning for the day. The other tray went under in the evening for the night shift.

Savoy cabbage transplant
Perhaps thick mulch isn’t great in the spring as it keeps the ground cool, but it does help when the temperatures drop to twenty. It keep the weeds at bay. Cabbage worms can hide in it. Later on it will keep the ground cool so the Savoy cabbage can survive Ozark sun a little longer.

Garden Headaches

The Savoy cabbage made it into the garden in early March. Of course winter moved right back in. The blankets came out for killing frost nights.

Now the cabbage moths have arrived. I’ve been busy doing other big projects and neglected to get these little transplants under mesh. Now I’m playing catch up once again.

At least, now that spring is officially here, winter visits are shorter and not as bad. The mesh is over the plants. Maybe I will get a few heads of Savoy cabbage from my dozen plants.

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Creating the Carduan Characters

The Carduan Chronicles is a nature study masquerading as science fiction, at least it is supposed to be. That leaves me creating the Carduan characters as science fiction to fit into real nature as the novel is set in an Ozark ravine and old, abandoned pasture with a creek.

However, the Carduan characters are pure imagination. I’m trying to create them as plausible beings from another planet. It’s a lot harder than I expected it to be.

First Consideration

Although an Ozark ravine can be fairly large, it isn’t large enough for a big space ship to land and remain unnoticed for long. That means the ship must be fairly small.

If the ship is small, the Carduans must be small as well. How big are they?

I went walking up several ravines in my area looking at what was there with a view of landing a ship there. Ravines flood so the landing spot must be up off the floor of the ravine.

The ravines have bluff rocks along them. The ship can land on one of these.

I ended up with a ship eighteen inches wide and high and thirty inches long. That left the Carduan characters at four inches tall.

Carduans

To arrive at what the Carduan characters look like, I had to decide on what their home planet Arkosa was like. My conjecture was a hot, dry planet bombarded by ultraviolet radiation. It became this way when a previous civilization destroyed their ozone layer. This destroyed that civilization and allowed these Arkosans to evolve.

Withstanding UV radiation requires several adaptations. One is a third eyelid to shield the eye from intense light. They can see UV light. Another adaptation is skin color. Blue pigments convert UV into harmless wavelengths.

Small size limits hand size, especially digits like fingers. The Carduans have three digits giving them a number system based on six, not ten.

Their background is somewhat like that of a praying mantis making them upright and agile. They are also strong, quick and aggressive in defense. It gives them a strongly matriarchal society that is in the process of changing as males are now long lived like the females, but still smaller.

Perhaps I am now ready to sketch what I think a Carduan looks like. And that makes writing The Carduan Chronicles easier.

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Animal Stories

Animal stories seem to be very popular with young children. They did stay popular with older children too, as I remember.

My favorites were horse stories. I read lots of them, fiction and nonfiction, until my mother started limiting how many I could check out. Then I moved to nature stories and still read many of both.

“Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow”

I picked up this little book years ago. It lived on my book shelf for years as I read others instead. It finally rose to the top of my reading list and I wish I had read it sooner.

Clare Kipps, the author, found Clarence as a hatchling on her door step. He had no feathers. His eyes were still closed. She fed the little mite some warm milk and went to bed thinking he wouldn’t make it through the night.

This common house sparrow was her companion for twelve years. He showed behaviors not seen in wild sparrows. She writes of his accomplishments and adventures, the devotion between them evident on every page.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fact and fiction mix in this book of short stories and tongue twisters based on my fifty years living with goats.

My Goats

When I started writing books, I started with a book about goats, “Goat Games”, and have written about my goats in several other books. Most of the books are novels, but the actions and adventures are based on things my goats have done over the years.

The last and more serious book about goats was “For Love of Goats”. Goats have been part of my life for fifty years now. The things in this little book are based on my relationships with goats. The memoir pieces are actual happenings.

Nubian doe kid Opal will star in some animal stories
Nubian doe High Reaches Opal will be one star of the series Opal and Agate: Partners in Adventure. This is a planned series of picture books about Nubian goat kids exploring their world and getting into trouble, something kids are good at.

Picture Books and Animal Stories

I’ve been reading several picture books a week. Animal stories abound on the shelves. Two recent ones are “Togo” about the dog sleds taking serum to cure diptheria from Anchorage to Nome and “Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!” about a gardener trying to outwit some hungry bunnies.

The first of my Opal and Agate: Partners in Adventure series is half written and I am beginning to do sketches for it. Much as I enjoy writing novels, it is relaxing to again be remembering my goats.

Why Are Animal Stories so Appealing?

Perhaps these stories help us remember our relationship to the Earth and the animals that become important parts of our lives.

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Pursuing Those Wild Birds

We have a bird feeder with many birds visiting daily in the backyard. I take pictures of them. However, some birds don’t visit. I am pursuing those wild birds to get pictures.

Since I don’t use a blind, there are challenges. My only asset is the zoom on the camera which I can’t always hold steady at high magnification.

Northern Cardinal perches in a peach tree
An old peach tree grows near our bird feeder. The birds use it as a place to sit and wait their turn at the feeder. It makes a good place to get pictures of many of the birds that visit the feeder.

Crows

From fall to early spring the crows march around the pastures. They announce their presence loudly. Strutting around they dare me to take the camera out.

Sometimes I can keep the old cow barn between me and the crows long enough to get half way across the pasture. Usually I am lucky to get to the fence before the crows fly off.

Wild Turkeys

Crows may be wary. Wild turkeys are even more so. One year a group of toms spent the fall and winter foraging grass seed in the pastures. These got used to me and I took lots of pictures of them.

The other ploy is to wander out to pasture with the goats. The turkeys know the goats and don’t pay them much attention. I managed to get within 70 feet of two one day before they realized I wasn’t a goat.

pursuing those wild birds took me down the creek to see this Great Blue Heron
This Great Blue Heron was fishing near the little bridge across a creek when I startled it. This was the beginning of a pursuit down the creek bank with my camera. spotting the heron on the branch of a fallen tree was pure luck as it blended into the vegetation. I took a couple of pictures and left so the heron could calm down.

Great Blue Herons

The creek attracts great blue herons. At different times one will be out near a deep pool hoping to snag a few minnows or unwary crayfish.

These birds blend in with the plants along the creek. They spot me and fly off long before I see them, let alone have the camera up.

So I had one take off from near the bridge when I started the tractor. It didn’t fly far so I turned off the tractor and got my camera. Pursuing those wild birds takes skills I do not possess, especially tramping through dry leaves.

To my surprise I did manage to spot this heron twice and get some pictures. Mission accomplished, I turned around and walked back to the tractor to get to work and leaving the heron to get on with stalking breakfast.

Pursuing those wild birds is a good excuse to sneak out along the creek or through the pastures. Sometimes I find extra things along the way.

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Living Two Lives

When I read about other writers, I find out many of them spend many hours a day writing. This seems to be the mark of a serious writer. It leaves me living two lives.

I love writing and am trying to be serious about it. Each day finds me at the computer writing something. Today it’s posts for the website. This evening I hope to add to the novel.

However, I have another life away from the computer. It involves goats, chickens, gardening and housework (phooey).

living two lives includes Nubian goats
This little Nubian doe kid is one of the latest additions to one of my lives.

Are They Separate?

Ostensibly these two lives are separate. In reality, they are not.

As I milk or wash dishes or shovel dirt, I plot my novel. This doesn’t always work out well as I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing.

When I am in town, my novel fills my mind. I miss stops I am supposed to make. Things get forgotten when I go shopping.

One difficulty with this is remembering the good plot points that occur to me once I get a chance to sit down at the computer. Generally I do remember enough to write a scene or two.

Another difficulty with this is trying to stay where I am in the novel plot. At the moment the plot is ending the setting up section and entering a phase setting up the climax of the book. It is much more interesting to think about the coming climax than the present plot steps.

Once I read advice to go ahead and write this interesting scene. In this case, that will not work as not all of the stage is set. I would have to totally rewrite the scene later on making major changes.

wild plum flowers are another aspect of my two lives
One of my activities is going out with my camera to photograph wild plants like this wild plum.

Finding the Balance

I will not give up either of my two lives. Living two lives is complicated and frustrating at times.

One method I’ve found is to set up times for each life. They do overlap some, but, like those who must balance work and home, it is possible.

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Container Gardening

The Ozarks has good soil well mixed with gravel. As my place is in a creek bottom, the gravel is a fifty fifty mix. That makes container gardening attractive.

Regular Garden

There are lots of things I grow that won’t work well in containers. Okra is one of them. One year I had an okra plant thirteen feet tall!

Pumpkins, summer and monster squash work better in the regular garden beds too. As do the tomatoes as there are so many of them.

Container gardening requires containers
Cattle lick tubs make great containers for gardening. They are heavy plastic, sturdy. The one thing to remember is that, once they are filled with gravel and soil, they are very heavy.

Easy Containers

My local feed store sells cattle lick tubs. These are sturdy plastic affairs that usually withstand cattle attacks.

The feed store buys back the empty tubs giving the ranchers someplace to go with them. Gardeners and others can buy the empties. And I have.

A few half inch holes in the bottom work for drainage. However, I am now putting the holes on the sides about an inch and a half up so I can set the tubs on the ground.

Challenges

Next year my container gardening will be easy, easier anyway. This year I have twenty-five empty containers to fill.

First, I put in a layer of larger gravel. This goes up an inch or so over the holes. This is a lot of gravel.

For the moment I am cleaning up the yard, chicken yard and barn lot. This did need doing, but was so easy to let slide. Now I need the gravel.

Second comes the dirt. These are big tubs needing close to a cubic yard of dirt. This is in short supply unless I order a load of unknown top soil with unknown ingredients in it.

I do have some dirt in tractor tires once used as raised beds, but now filled with weeds. A fifty fifty mix with compost will fill most, if not all of the containers. It just takes time and effort.

Tomato seedlings
One tomato plant can be grown in a cattle lick container. However, four pepper plants do well.

Container Gardening Dreams

What will I plant in these containers once they are ready? Perhaps carrots, lettuce, leeks, green onions and peppers will fill most of them. Onion sets are in some set up in previous years. They do well in them.

One thing is for sure. It will be interesting to see how well my container gardening experiment works out.

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Raising Bottle Kids

When I first started raising goats, all the books I found about it said raising bottle kids was what you should do. So I did.

That left me heating milk, washing bottles and nipples several times a day. My does were unhappy. The kids didn’t care so much as they played together.

Forget the Bottles

I worked full time. Bottle schedules just didn’t happen. I let the kids nurse their mothers. Everyone was happy, except me.

Kids, especially buck kids love milk and will drink as much as they can. That didn’t leave much for my refrigerator. However, the kids looked great and got big fast.

Bottles Can be Necessary

It seems triplets happen every year. Goats have two teats. That third kid gets shoved out and doesn’t get enough to eat. I have a bottle baby.

Some kids are born small. Some are born with problems. Sometimes a mother rejects a kid for her own personal reason. I am left raising bottle kids.

Raising bottle kids like this buck kid's sister
When a doe has triplets, she rarely can raise all three. Little buck kids like this one are usually more aggressive than doe kids and take more than their share. With two big brothers, my little doe is a bottle baby.

My Method

Since I raise few bottle kids, I have a casual routine. All my kids are bottle kids the first day. It’s often much easier to bottle the colostrum than it is to get a kid on a teat to nurse. Once the kid has had some milk and is up and active, it much easier to show them how to nurse.

If I am raising bottle kids, the kids are not shown how to nurse. If they are active enough, I do leave them out with their mother and siblings. She will often take care of that third kid even though it isn’t nursing her.

If the kid is small or weak, the kid moves into a box in the house. A heating pad wrapped in a plastic bag and old towels is in the bottom for whenever necessary.

The bottles I use are plastic soda bottles. I like them because they don’t break if I drop them and are easily replaced when they won’t clean up well.

The nipple is a black lamb’s nipple. I’ve used the lamb bar nipples and like them, but don’t often find them at the feed store. They are easier to put on the bottles.

Milk or Replacer?

I prefer to use goat milk. However, I do use kid milk replacer if goat milk is in short supply. I usually work up to almost half a gallon of milk a day.

The kids get bottles every few hours for several days, except for a stretch overnight when the kid is in the barn. This settles to four a day for a month, then three for a month, then two. The amount of milk goes up each feeding as the number of feedings goes down.

Raising bottle kids is time consuming. The bottles and nipples need to be washed out every time. The milk must be warm enough. And the job continues for close to three months to result in big, healthy kids.

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County Fairs

When I first moved to the country, county fairs were important events. Actually, I remember going to the fairs in southern California when I was young.

Off to Pasadena

Late August was the time for the California State Fair in Pasadena. Later it became the Los Angeles County Fair. It meant a long ride over the hills to spend the day wandering around.

This was a big event with lots of big barns filled with horticultural exhibits, machinery, livestock, vendor booths. The goat barn was a favorite stop.

County Fairs begin with parades
My 4-H Goat Project was a hit with the Carroll County Fair, Berryville, AR, the year we had a goat cart pulled by two young wethers in the parade.

Rural County Fairs

My small town in northwest Arkansas had a fair in August. It wasn’t a big affair, but did have barns for poultry, cattle and pigs. The fair book included goats and sheep, but no one brought any.

I had a 4-H goat project. We wanted to bring goats to the fair. So I got permission and set up half of the hog barn for the goats.

We borrowed a pair of pigmy goats for the few days. One had her kids and was the hit of the fair.

We had five breeds of dairy goats there. And a goat breeder came to judge a small show for us.

cover for "Mistaken Promises" Hazel Whitmore #3 by Karen GoatKeeper
Hazel may be like lots of rural people raising pullets for the fresh eggs. However, it’s always fun to take your pullets to the county fair and show them off.

“Mistaken Promises”

Because of my past associations with county fairs and my local area in Missouri still held them, one fit into my novel as Hazel could show off her Buff Orpington pullets. It also was a good place for the final showdown in the novel.

Times have changed. The main participants in my area are the 4-H and FFA members now. Livestock now centers around cattle, hogs and meat goats.

My memories of county fairs make me wish people still loved participating in them. It seems people are too busy now to enjoy such simple things, especially ones that take months of preparation with only ribbons to show for their efforts.

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Writing “Mistaken Promises”

Writing “Mistaken Promises” was like writing an epilogue for “Old Promises.” Epilogues and prologues are usually discouraged in writing advice. This is because they are often used as ways to put in lots of world building and backstory rather than as part of the story. Used well, these can both open up the story and close the story, things I’ve done.

Writing an Epilogue

When I wrote “Capri Capers” there were lots of story lines not really completed, only hints of what the endings would be. However, the plot itself was over, so stringing it along would drag the ending out, not make it better. The same was true for “Hopes, Dreams and Reality”.

For these novels, I added a single chapter called Epilogue. This completed those story lines, endings that happened much later than the original story. It gave closure to the story for the various characters.

As I write “The Carduan Chronicles”, I’ve used a Prologue to set up having two space ships involved in the story. The original Ship Nineteen is stranded in an ice storm in an Ozark ravine. Ship Eighteen is stranded in space in a race against starvation and running out of fuel as they attempt to reach the Ozark ravine. Their link is through Sola and her son Tico.

cover for "Mistaken Promises" Hazel Whitmore #3 by Karen GoatKeeper
Although I began “Mistaken Promises” as an epilogue for “Old Promises”, it soon took on a life of its own.

“Mistaken Promises” Was Different

As I finished writing “Old Promises”, the novel didn’t feel done. There had to be fall out from the big mess at the end. Too much fall out to just add a chapter called Epilogue.

So, writing “Mistaken Promises” dealt with that fall out. Basically I was writing the epilogue to “Old Promises” when I wrote this novel. As I wrote it, it became more than an epilogue.

Hazel was finding new ways to adjust to living in a rural community. She joins the 4-H, raises some Buff Orpington chickens, competes in the county fair. She starts to leave many of her city ways and ideas behind.

Lucy, too, is branching out. She is learning to be more out going. As a teenager, she is seeking out her own identity.

I enjoyed writing “Mistaken Promises” and seeing how my characters were adjusting and moving on with their lives. Perhaps, someday, I will want to return to Crooked Creek and see where these people have gone.

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Searching for Witch Hazel

A few wildflowers, international travelers like wayside speedwell and dead nettle, bloom even in January thaw. But I’m searching for witch-hazel, a native bush that blooms in February.

Hard to Find

Witch-hazel used to be common in gravelly stream beds. Now it is hard to find. Unfortunately for it, people want the inner bark to make herbal tinctures.

Although it is possible to buy seedlings and grow this plant, many herb diggers go searching for witch-hazel in the wild. As they have no real investment in the plant or property, they strip the plant. Some plants survive. Some don’t.

Herb Diggers

Many native plants are similarly attacked. Ginseng, golden seal, bloodroot are a few.

I met someone who dug golden seal. This person had never seen it bloom as he dug the plant up before it could reproduce.

Other herb diggers strip flowers from plants like elderberries and wild plums. These plants are not difficult to cultivate and seedlings are available from state nurseries every year for very little money.

searching for witch hazel
In Dent County, MO, the witch hazel blooms in February down in creek bottoms. At least it does if the herb diggers haven’t found it. A friend knew of this large patch so we went searching for witch hazel, hoping it was still in bloom. It was still blooming as were the many black alder bushes.

Recovery

When we moved to this place in the Ozarks, there was very little golden seal or bloodroot or echinaceae. We did our best to keep the herb diggers away.

Now I go back in a ravine to find a field of bloodroot in bloom. Another hill has a wide strip of golden seal which is scattered in other places too.

Very few people are invited to see the lady’s slippers blooming in other places. This plant, too, is popular for people to dig up and move to personal gardens where it soon dies.

Lucky Year

I mentioned searching for witch-hazel to a friend as I need pictures to include in my Dent County Flora. She happens to know where a patch of it grows. Another friend has some planted near his house.

Pictures of the plant in the wild are preferable so my friend and I will go visiting that patch. But, if I need to get a better plant picture, I may visit my other friend’s plants as they won’t be tucked into a wild community making the plants hard to see.