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

Cottontail Rabbit Invasion

As I finished milking the other evening, I noticed a cottontail rabbit eating grass. That was a bit unusual, but I have no barn cat right now.

This rabbit didn’t concern me until it calmly hopped over to my garden fence. My garden is fenced with two by four welded wire. The rabbit slipped through and into the garden.

My garden does not need a hungry rabbit. I charged in. The rabbit left.

Cottontail rabbit invasion
People tell me the cottontail rabbit invasion is widespread in this part of the Ozarks. There are numerous rabbits near my garden and in the back yard. This may bring the gray foxes back.

Raising Rabbits

Never confuse a cottontail rabbit with a domestic rabbit. All the domestic rabbit breeds trace back to European rabbits. None trace back to the native rabbits.

Years ago I had a commercial rabbitry. Even more years before that my family raised rabbits. They make good pets and good dinner.

My commercial rabbitry had around a hundred does divided into eight sections. Each week one section got bred, another section got nesting boxes and another had their little ones weaned.

Does did move between sections from time to time for various reasons so they were mixed up. My father came up with a great system to keep track of them.

I bought clothes pins. They were painted red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, black and white. One side was all colored, the other half. They were clipped to the feeders.

When I walked down the aisles, the clothes pins told me which section the doe was in. If she was bred, the half side was out. If she had babies, the full side showed.

Rabbit Food?
My Savoy cabbages look great. If the cottontail rabbits make it into the garden, they may disappear.

Cottontail Rabbit

Chicken wire got stretched across over the garden fence. That seemed to work as nothing seemed to get eaten.

The number of rabbits eating the grass kept increasing. Four were there one morning. I got nervous.

Then the few beets still in the garden got eaten. Was it the rabbits? If it was, the rabbits had gone around the garden to the far side. Then again, I’d seen a chipmunk zip out the fence there and they eat gardens too.

Chicken wire is going up around the garden fence and on the gates. The rabbits and chipmunks can eat outside the garden.

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GKP Writing News

Carpe Diem Seize the Day

Autumn Cornwell really struck a chord in “Carpe Diem” with me. I use lists a lot. Her main character, Vassar Spore, creates her life in lists of things she wants to accomplish.

My lists have a different purpose. They are lists of things to accomplish, but are tasks needing to be done rather than life goals.

In the Book “Carpe Diem”

Vassar is 16 and in stiff competition to be valedictorian for her high school class. She plans to take AP courses over the summer in pursuit of a 5.3 GPA on a 4 point scale.

Her life goals include being valedictorian, attending Vassar College, marrying a blond surgeon and writing a Pulitzer Prize book. She is a super achiever.

My Lists

To Do lists are so boring. Mine include chores, watering garden, cleaning out the barn, making cheese, cleaning house. Mundane goals for a quiet life.

My life goals are equally modest now. I want to finish a couple of books I’m working on. And I want to finally get my website organized and attracting visitors who will buy my books.

Life Intervenes

Vassar’s goals are upended with a phone call by Grandma Gerd. Suddenly her AP courses are gone as she will be in Southeast Asia for the summer.

Instead of Latin, Vassar will be writing a novel for AP credit. From the pieces put into the book, she will be rewriting and editing for years.

In addition, Vassar is trying to find out why her parents let Grandma Gerd blackmail them into sending her off for the summer. Even though she is constantly getting into trouble, usually her own fault, she does find the answer.

Carpe diem? Not these goats hiding in the barn from the horseflies.
My Nubian goats have discovered the old cow barn. Now that the horseflies are out, the herd goes out the pasture gate and straight to the cow barn to wait out the day. I see them sneak out from time to time to graze.

For me, I write in the morning just after milking. I’m awake and thinking about the plot. The other things happen in the afternoon.

Except the temperatures are now too hot to work outside by noon. So I am doing the work in the mornings and trying to write in the afternoons when I am tired, hot and wishing I could do nothing.

“Carpe Diem”

Seize the Day. Vassar is so busy making her lists, she forgets what is happening each day. How many of us do this?

It’s hard to stop trying to live in the past or the future, yet we can do neither. We can only live today. Planning is great. However, don’t let it rob you of your life.

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GKP Writing News

Writing Book Reviews

Writing book reviews is becoming big business. There are numerous websites and people who do reviews professionally.

As an author, I see lots of advice for authors. One mainstay is finding people to review your book so you can use the reviews, if they are favorable, in your book promotions.

Review Guidelines

Supposedly the author is not to pay for book reviews. This might be considered as a way to buy good reviews, deserved or not.

Amazon wants a reviewer to first purchase the book from them in order to leave a review. Since the company makes money from selling books, not reviews, this is understandable. It also makes it hard for anyone else to leave a review.

cover for "Capri Capers" by Karen GoatKeeper
Capri Capers is being offered as a free eBook this month at Smashwords with code H2X8G. This is my gift to you. Is it worth a review from you?

Review Considerations

I write book reviews. However, there are genres I am not qualified for writing book reviews as I rarely to never read those genres.

People who read only one genre might be considered good book reviewers for that genre. It also makes it harder for a new author as their book will be compared to all the other books in that genre.

Giving copies of a book to a reviewer can taint the view of a resulting review. As I don’t buy books, but borrow them from the library or pull them off my own shelves, I am limited in which books I can review. My personal stash is old, some going back fifty years and difficult to obtain any more.

Doing Ratings

Goodreads, where I post my reviews, has a five star system for rating a book. It usually suffices.

The biggest drawback in this system for me is that five stars says a book is amazing. Even three stars which should be a so so rating says I liked the book. That leaves me writing book reviews with ratings of mostly four stars.

Another drawback is that it asks for a single rating. A book can be very well written and still be one you did not enjoy, maybe even loathed. My work around is to give a second rating in the comment section.

Review Tyranny

Another big drawback to the rating/review requirement for books is how people are coerced into thinking a book with a lower rating or few reviews isn’t worth their reading time. Any book, no matter how good, has readers who don’t like the book and can lower the rating for the book.

Then there are those who read a book and leave no reviews. The author and the book are at their mercy in today’s marketplace. And the reader let them down.

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Latest From High Reaches

Sweet Elderberry

Walking along the road the last few days, a sweet fragrance drifts by or hangs in the air. There are several sources including persimmon trees and prairie roses, but the scent of sweet elderberry is the strongest.

Elderberry plants could almost be classed as shrubs, at least the older ones. They are perennials. Unless the road crew comes by, the stems overwinter and sprout new leaves in the spring along with new canes that shoot up around them.

Hard to Miss

Even out of range of the sweet elderberry perfume, an elderberry in bloom is difficult to miss. The canes are up to six feet tall with huge umbels of waxy white flowers. Large compound leaves hanging on long petioles jut off from the canes.

The plants seem to prefer open areas near wet areas. Roadsides and edges of pastures are prime places to look for them.

sweet elderberry flowers
This elderberry grows behind the mailbox. It makes trips to get the mail a sweet experience while the flowers are open. Later the berries will grow and ripen, perfect for a few snacks, although the ripe berries don’t seem to have much flavor.

The New Miracle Plant

People seem to like think eating one special thing will cure all that ails them. Sweet elderberry is a recent target.

The berries are small, barely a quarter inch across and haven’t much flavor in my opinion. But these same berries are now being farmed, gathered from wild plants, juiced and sold for high prices as miracle plants.

Perhaps ingesting this juice will help some people. The true benefactors of this new interest are the pollinators, provided the fields aren’t sprayed.

Eating a sensible diet and getting plenty of exercise is a better way to better health. Of course, that means giving up most caffeine, alcohol, sugar and white flour which is difficult. A side benefit is losing weight and feeling better.

Place to Start

In Missouri there are plenty of Conservation Areas with walking trails. Park the wheels, put on a hat and go walking. Right now, you can follow the sweet elderberry scent along some of those trails.

Meet other Ozark plants in Exploring the Ozark Hills.

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GKP Writing News

Wild Capri Capers

We were watching some old Rin Tin Tin movie serials and I wondered if I could write a serial about a goat. Every episode ends with a cliff hanger, so a wild Capri Capers took shape.

Movie Serials

When movies started and were only shown in theaters, the theaters wanted a way to keep people coming back every week. The movie serial was born.

These serials lasted for weeks with a melodrama plot. Each episode was full of action and ended with something dangerous happening leaving the hero or heroine in mortal danger.

The following week the dangerous happening was shown again with changes. Those changes let the hero or heroine survive to continue the plot only to again get into a dangerous situation.

cover for "Capri Capers" by Karen GoatKeeper
Begun as a lark and an experiment, Capri Capers was such fun it became a book.

Melodramas

These are simple plays. They normally have three main characters: a hero, a heroine or damsel in distress and a villain. The villain had some dastard scheme to capture the heroine and was foiled by the hero.

My father and his friends made up these plays up every week while he was in high school. They put on the plays for the students during lunch every Friday. My father always played the villain.

Proper protocol had the audience greet the hero with cheers and the villain with hisses and boos. At graduation all the students booed my father in honor of his years playing the villain.

Wild Capri Capers

The original draft of Capri Capers was in true movie serial format. Every chapter ended with a cliff hanger. The next chapter looked at the cliff hanger and solved it before launching the plot into the next cliff hanger.

Every name was chosen like a melodrama name. Dan Janus is after the two faced Roman god. Leroy Rogue and Roscoe Rascal are the villains. Harriet Zeigenhirt’s last name is German for goat.

The final draft changed the cliff hanger repeats into a more familiar novel plot line. However, the cliff hangers are still ending the chapters of a wild Capri Capers tale.

Oh, yes, there is a goat, several goats in the story. Capri is a goat and plays a big part in the story.

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Latest From High Reaches

Forever Mullein

In 1849 a professor at Mishigan State University got curious. Farmers kept asking him how long weed seeds remained viable in the soil. Little did he suspect his long acquaintance with forever mullein.

In my own garden weeds are a constant battle. I can pull every one in a given area, come back in a couple of weeks to find weeds covering the same area.

forever mullein plants
Mullein is a biennial. The first year a rosette of hairy gray-green leaves tries to hide down in the grass. The second year the leaves get huge as the spire rises up, sometimes branching to make a candelabra up to six feet tall. The flower spike opens flowers more-or-less in circular arrays moving from the base to the top.

Weed Seed Bank

Whenever a weed succeeds in producing and dropping seeds, they join others hiding in the soil. These wait, sometimes for years, for conditions to be right. Then they germinate.

Desert wildflowers are a good example of this. For years an area of desert may go without rain. No wildflowers grow.

Right after a rain, the desert blooms as seeds hiding in the soil germinate. People come for miles to see the array of flowers covering what is usually bare dirt.

Longevity Experiment

This professor devised an experiment to find out how long weed seeds would survive in the soil. He put damp soil in over twenty glass bottles. Seeds from twenty-three different common weeds were collected and fifty of each were added to this soil. Then he buried them in a container outside.

For several years the professor took out one bottle and germinated the weed seeds. Another professor took over the experiment leaving years between when a bottle would be dug up.

Fewer and fewer kinds of weed seeds germinated. After 142 years, a bottle was dug up. The seeds were coddled in an attempt to germinate them. Only one kind still does, the forever mullein.

forever mullein flowers
Called a weed, the forever mullein has lovely yellow flowers overnight into the morning. They are primarily moth pollinated to produce those long lived seeds.

Weed Free Hopes

Most of the common weed seeds only survived a few years. If I can keep any new weed seeds from being added to my soil for five years, most of my weeding problems would be over.

One weed would remain, the forever mullein.

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Latest From High Reaches

My Carduan World

Sitting at my computer now I am being serenaded by gray tree frogs. In the distance are several different birds settling on their roosts. Later on the whip-poor-will will call. This will be the Carduan world.

A thunderstorm went through earlier this evening. Storms are common during an Ozark spring. Ice and snow fall in February, maybe March. Rain in March and April. Thunderstorms mark the change from spring to summer in late April and May. This will be the Carduan world.

Being Complacent

There are lots of interactions going on between the nine Carduans. It is easy to focus my writing on these and toss in a storm now and then. But that isn’t real. It’s being lazy, being complacent, not thinking about the natural world.

Putting the natural world into the Carduan world will take outlining the various weeks. They do have approximate dates assigned in the outline I already have. Now I need to do a second outline with the weather, plant blooming, animal appearances, sounds that might occur during each of those weeks.

Dandelions food on Carduan world
One of the first edible plants easy to find in the spring is the dandelion. Although it is an import from Europe and occasional near creeks and pasture edges, it could be found by the Carduans. Both the flowers and leaves are edible. The root can be roasted and used for a coffee substitute.

How do I Know These?

That is the good thing about setting Cardua in an Ozark ravine. I’ve walked ravines, pastures, explored creeks, watched various storms and their aftermaths for thirty years.

No, I don’t know everything that happens. No one does. But I can add enough of these to make the Carduan world seem real. And that matters to me and, I hope, to readers of this massive work once it gets done.

When will “The Carduan Chronicles” be done?

I am impatient to see this story finally get written. It has been several years in the planning, drafting, rewriting and editing. I want to move on to other projects.

However, I want these books, and I find there will be four of them, to be right. That takes time. I’m hoping the first one about Ship Nineteen will be done and out this fall. The one on Ship Eighteen should be ready about the same time.

This depends on my writing time and getting the Carduan world right.

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Latest From High Reaches

Purple Milkweed Blooming

Missouri is home to a wide variety of milkweeds that spread their blooms over the warm months. The purple milkweed blooming along the roads and in the edges of the woods is the first of the milkweed parade.

No Milkweeds Means No Monarchs

This is what the Missouri Conservation Department keeps saying. And it is true as milkweeds are the only plants their caterpillars feed on.

Those milkweeds are fewer in number every year as the places where they grow are plowed under, sprayed and mowed. They have no modern economic value, so they are destroyed with little thought for the consequences.

butterflies love purple milkweed blooming
Butterfly gardens, especially those with milkweeds are popular for monarch butterflies. Purple milkweed, Asclepias purpurescens, is a good choice for semi shade. It is a lovely plant and very popular with butterflies, wasps, bumblebees. clearwing hawkmoths and more.

Valuable Milkweeds

Although the big push to grow milkweeds is for the monarchs, there are other reasons too. An easy dozen kinds of insects visit the flowers.

Purple milkweed blooming is a magnet. Frittilary butterflies were tromping around drinking nectar. Dodging their feet were wasps, bumblebees and bees. Another visitor is the clearwing hawkmoth that hovers like an hummingbird.

Flower or crab spiders ambush prey on the flowers. Various beetles move in. The plants attract aphids and milkweed bugs.

Perennials

Because milkweeds are perennials, they are great for erosion control. Some are very showy like the popular butterfly weed. Others need lots of space like the common milkweed that spreads into a patch. Most like lots of sun.

A huge patch of purple milkweed blooming is gorgeous. The clouds of orange, brown, yellow, white, purple, black and more butterflies shifting between the upright umbels add to the beauty.

cover for "Missouri's Milkweeds, Milkvines and Pipevines" by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
A guidebook and more to the milkweeds, milkvines and pipevines known to grow in Missouri.

Growing Places

I see purple milkweed blooming in places with some shade and moisture. The common milkweed does well in road ditches, sometimes reaching six feet fall or more. Butterfly weed likes it drier and sunnier. It is rarely over two feet tall. Water gardens or the edges of ponds and lakes is favored by pink swamp milkweed.

Green, whorled and spider milkweeds are easy to grow too. They like dry and sunny places.

Butterfly gardens need milkweeds.

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Storm Reports

Lately the news has lots of storm reports. One of my latest reading books was “A Storm Too Soon” by Michael J. Tougias about a storm to rival the reports.

This excellent nonfiction thriller follows three sailors on a sailboat crossing the Atlantic. They left a month before hurricane season, but two low pressures joined forces to create a hurricane.

When the sailboat sinks, the Coast Guard rescue units attempt to find the life raft and rescue the sailors. There are photographs in the book of the monstrous eighty foot tall waves.

Local Storm Reports

Storms much tamer than the one in the book have been passing through the Ozarks lately. One caused a flash flood. Most drop an inch or less of rain, maybe have some lightning and thunder and big winds.

The frequency can be a nuisance. The grass loves the rain and warm weather. The mower doesn’t mind the warm weather, but doesn’t like the rain or resulting wet grass. Barn cleaning is no fun in wet weather either, especially rain as the goats are in the way.

I’ve written about Ozark storms in both “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and “My Ozark Home”. The ones in recent years are different as they are usually small rains or big downpours.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
Several of the nature essays in this book concern storms, rain, ice and snow, and the results of those storms.

Gardens and Rain

With summer plants and seeds going into the garden, the frequent small rains are very helpful. I put in the squash seeds, let the rain water them in and watch the seedlings appear a few days later. Tomatoes and peppers love the rain too.

One problem has come up. The flash flood filled in the creek pool I use for water during dry times with gravel.

That is another aspect of the new weather patterns. A wet time is followed by a dry one that borders on drought before the next wet cycle begins.

The gravel problem is one of many to solve. For the present I will watch the storm reports.

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GKP Writing News

Menu Planning

I’m reading a fun book now called “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown in which a robot is marooned on an island. Being a robot, she doesn’t eat so Brown is saved the problem of menu planning.

On the other hand, my Carduans are alive and do eat. They need to explore their ravine and find foods they find palatable and obtainable.

Plant Menu Planning

Since the Carduans arrive in the ravine in mid February, their plant choices are very limited. Most plants are dormant until the weather warms up. The plantains, chickweed and dandelions I see in my garden are not often seen in the ravines as they are alien plants, although they emigrated here in colonial times.

As the weeks go by, the weather warms and lots of plants start to appear. The action takes place over fifteen six-day weeks, so there is a time frame.

My research covers when different plants appear, grow and bloom. Then the question is whether they are edible. Some like yellow rocket are edible, but bitter. Water cress is edible, but an acquired taste. Spicebush and redbud blooms are tasty, but hard to reach for the Carduans.

Menu planning for squirrel
Although a squirrel would be a good meal for the Carduans, catching one is quite a different matter. Squirrels are bigger than they are and easily climb trees. They are also fierce fighters.

Meat Menu Planning

The Carduans are omnivores, eating both plants and animals. However, the Carduans are limited in what animals they can tackle.

People think of deer or wild turkey. These are far too big for the Carduans to tackle. Even rabbits are bigger than they are.

The most available creatures small enough for the Carduans to tackle are mice, voles, minnows and crawdads, possibly moles, chipmunks and squirrels. Since the permanent camp they establish is near what they call a river and we call a creek, minnows and crawdads are easily found. The others are harder to find.

One other source of food is one most people would avoid: insects. Many insects are edible, the right size and, during warm months, available.

Menu planning for such small characters is challenging. It forces me to think outside the box.