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

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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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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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.

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GKP Writing News

Editing This Picture Book

Finishing a picture book isn’t so different from finishing a novel. Of course, “Ducks Love Hats” has no text, but each and every illustration must be checked and rechecked. If I’m lucky, I will catch any mistakes while editing this picture book.

How the Illustrations Were Done

The Creating Picture Book course started with five young people. Family problems took three of them away just as we were starting to draw the parts of the illustrations.

What I was left with were the four ducks in a variety of poses and eight hats. I had already volunteered to do the backgrounds. What I lacked, and two of those who had to leave were good at, were the people. People are a big challenge for me.

All of the ducks and hats were scanned into my computer. All of the background pages were scanned in.

Next, I did people outlines. There were two family groups of parents and two children. They did various things so I needed lots of different poses for each one. One saving part was being able to reuse some of the poses as the families came at different times in the story. Once the outlines were scanned in, I painted the people.

Using layers each person, duck and hat were put into the illustrations. I like using layers for this as I can resize and move them as needed.

"Ducks Love Hats" page
A happy duck family swims away with their hats in “Ducks Love Hats” by Karen GoatKeeper and others.

Assembling the Picture Book

The layered illustrations are merged, saved and inserted into the book. The book itself is a Word document with 0.1” margins.

Then editing this picture book began. Hats were missing. Ducks were missing. People weren’t in the right places.

This is why I save the layered illustration as well as the merged one. I can open the layered one, make the needed changes, merge and insert the corrected illustration.

Final Touches

Title page and cover are the last things I do. However, editing this picture book will go on as several people look over the pages of the book itself without the title page and cover. I’m hoping they don’t find any more mistakes.

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Pullet Eggs

Hens do occasionally lay small eggs. These might be only white or have a bit of yolk in them. Pullet eggs are different.

Raising Chickens

In April, I rode to Cackle Hatchery and brought home a box of fluffy chicks. They were a variety of colors as there were several varieties of chickens.

Fluffy chicks don’t stay fluffy very long. Feathers sprout pushing the fluff off which is a good reason to not raise chicks in the house. The dust and fluff go all over.

Once the chicks feather out, they start looking like little pullets or cockerels. The big tip off are the combs as pullets tend to stay small and cockerels tend to get big. A little later cockerels get long feathers beside their tails and longer feather in their tails.

Then There Are Hens and Roosters

My Easter Egger cockerels began crowing in only two months. This was disappointing as I had ordered all pullets and ended up with three roosters and eight pullets.

By three months these noisy ones considered themselves big, bad roosters. The pullets were not impressed and fled squawking setting off chicken races.

Finally, my first pullet eggs are arriving. The pullets at almost five months are now becoming hens. Roosters are still not very appreciated, but are tolerated.

Dominique pullet
This is the Dominique pullet now laying pullet eggs for me.

Pullet Eggs

These are small. It takes nearly three to equal a large egg. The pullets are still small too.

As the new hens finish growing up, their eggs will increase in size. Then I will gather up medium to large eggs.

Right now I am more concerned with moving my new hens to the big hen house. This is one way to get lots of exercise as I can only carry three at a time making nine trips. In a week or so they will move into the hen house on their own.

The next goal is convincing them to lay in the hen house nests. Perhaps the older hens will start using these nests again too. After all, the black snakes are going to bed for the winter. But that’s another story.

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Glade Exploring

Glades are special places often with plants found no where else. There is a small one near my home, so I went glade exploring.

What Is a Glade?

The ones I have visited have lots of rocks, thin soil and lots of dryness and heat. They are sloped. Chiggers love them as numerous lizards often live there, the preferred host for the minute biters. Before going glad exploring, be sure to spray to discourage these little attackers.

My small one is up on the side of a hill. It would seem unusual in that it is not far from the bottom of a small ravine. Yet it is definitely very dry much of the time with no trees other than some invading red cedars – the enemy of a glade.

Missouri Coneflower found when glade exploring
There are so many yellow aster type flowers. Although Missouri Coneflower reminds you of Purple Coneflower, it is in a different group, Rudebekia. They are still lovely to see especially when there are several dozen blooming.

What Did I Find?

No real rain has fallen in several weeks so all the plants were wilted to dried up, even the grass. Still, a few plants were still surviving. I was mostly interested in a yellow coneflower and the blazing star blooming among the rocks.

What I hope to find is an Adder’s Tongue, a type of fern. This grows in glades, but, being a fern, likes moisture. When the weather is dry, it withers away.

This fern puts up a single leaf, not a frond. It is usually seen in spring and fall when rain is supposed to fall.

Blazing Star Liatris
Three of these small Liatris flowers grow in my area. This one is officially called Blazing Star, although the others are often called that too. What sets this flower apart is the calyx below the tube flowers with the fat and pointed scales plus lots of hairs on the edges. To me this flower is purple, but it is often listed under pink in the wildflower books.

Another Fern

I have found another wet weather fern. It’s called a Resurrection Fern and grows on a large rock outcrop. Whenever it rains during warm weather, this fern unrolls its fronds.

This gives me hope the Adder’s tongue will reappear in this small glade once fall rains decide to come and visit.

Will it rain soon? Actually almost an inch fell the other day and the temperatures dropped into the eighties.

The rain is still on a cloud to cloud basis. This is when a thunderstorm cloud floats by and drops rain in one small area, but leaves nearby areas dry.

That small rain means I will go glade exploring to see if the small area has perked up as much as my pasture.

Find out more about many Ozark plants in Exploring the Ozark Hills.

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Doing Cold Canning

Late summer has arrived in the Ozarks along with sacks of tomatoes and peppers. That leaves me doing cold canning.

Then the library obtained a book called “Cold Canning” by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough which I checked out as soon as it was put out on the shelf. It isn’t exactly what I wanted, but I’m glad to read it for new ideas.

What Is Cold Canning?

Regular canning is hot work. It requires a big canner which is a pressure cooker, special jars with lids and rings and lots of time and hot work.

The result is a pantry filled with jars of various vegetables, sauces and more. My problem is how long those jars sit on the shelves as two old people don’t eat that much.

So, I gave up my canner and changed to freezing my vegetables. In other words, I’m doing cold canning.

Speckled Roman tomatoes for cold canning
There are lots of paste tomato varieties. Some are determinate like Roma which ripens all its tomatoes at the same time. Speckled Roman is indeterminate so it produces tomatoes the whole season. It is prolific and has a good taste.

Doing Tomatoes a New Way

My favorite tomatoes for freezing are Speckled Romans. These red and yellow striped paste tomatoes are indeterminate so the crop comes in a bag or two at a time.

Forget peeling the tomatoes. There’s nutrition in those peels most people throw away. Instead, I dice the tomatoes into a big stainless steel pot and cook them down into a thick soup.

This is strained using a colander. The juice is frozen in quart freezer bags. Then the pulp is pureed and frozen in quart freezer bags. Only two or three cups go into a bag, enough for a meal.

Those Pretty Jars

In “Cold Canning” sauces, condiments, jams and more are frozen in glass jars. The pictures look so pretty. I suppose I could use jars.

However, using bags lets me freeze them flat. This makes lining them up in the freezer easy and saves a lot of space.

The recipes are the attraction in “Cold Canning”. This year I want to try making some salsa and doing cold canning is my preferred method.