Category: Latest From High Reaches

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Enjoying the Sunflower Parade

Each season seems to have wildflower colors more common than others. Spring is blue and pink. Fall is purple. Summer is yellow with the sunflower parade.

This begins with brown-eyed susans assisted by yellow ironweed. Then the sunflowers begin.

One of the sunflower parade
This Helianth sunflower is typical of many wild sunflowers with the smaller disk and single row of yellow rays. The leaves are normally opposite. Another group normally has alternate leaves. The disks are usually yellow.

Lots of Sunflowers

To people driving by the many sunflowers look alike. They have yellow ‘petals’ and a yellow or brown center. They are usually tall with big leaves. Even now the fields of tickseed sunflower are just another in the sunflower parade.

If you stop and look, these plants are not all the same. They are alike in that these ‘flowers’ are really flower heads with bright ray flowers surrounding a disk of small, tubular flowers. But these are different on different plants too.

Look at the leaves. Some pairs of leaves are on opposite sides of the stem. Other leaves aren’t in pairs but alternate on their way up the stem. Some have smooth edges, some tiny teeth, others large teeth.

member of the sunflower parade
This sunflower is more like the grown sunflowers with the larger brown disk and short rays. Many of the wild sunflowers produce edible seeds that are too small to bother with except for the birds.

And the Flower Heads

Some ray flowers are short and broad. Others are long and thin. There are notches in the ends of others. Even their colors are different as some are very yellow and others have orange tints.

The center flowers can be yellow or brown. They put out stamens covered with pollen. Most of these are yellow, but not all. Some make a mound. Others are flat.

Naming Sunflowers

I’ve taken pictures of the different sunflowers for years. Most of them have names like 1 Sunflower, 2 Sunflower.

There are easy ones like Prairie dock with its enormous basal leaves. Tickseed sunflower is another one as the plant has a tapered look, the leaves have big lobes and the ray flowers are broad and thin.

The rest of them are still on my list to be identified. There is a key, several in fact. They haven’t helped much. This year I am looking up pictures to compare with my pictures. Perhaps I will spend some time setting up the pictures to put on iNaturalist in the hopes someone more knowledgeable than I will know what they are.

One other thing I will do is enjoy the sunflower parade even as the asters try to take over and signal the end of summer.

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Amazing Pawpaw

Although people might have heard of pawpaws, few of them know what a pawpaw is. When we first moved to the Ozarks, we didn’t know anything about the amazing pawpaw.

The Patch

Along a pasture fence was a patch of these strange trees. Their huge leaves had a tropical look to them. Their purple flowers opened upside down in the spring, but there was no fruit.

Down along the river were some other patches of these trees we identified as pawpaws. These had a few fruits, if you can call green potatoes fruits.

When these ripened in late summer we tried eating them. The next year we gathered pollen from the river trees for out pasture trees. Now these had fruits on them.

pawpaw flowers
Since mid spring blooming pawpaw flowers aren’t interested in having bees, wasps or bumblebees visit, they point down and advertise for flies and beetles. As the tree gets taller, it gets harder to get the flowers pollinated although the amazing cluster is nearly ten feet up.

Pawpaw Facts

These semi tropical trees are a native fruit probably from Florida or the Gulf Coast. Indians liked them, eating the fruit and using the inner bark as fiber. They spread the trees all through the eastern U.S.

Pawpaws are an understory tree near, but not in, water as in ravines or along creeks. With their large leaves, they can and do grow straight even growing in the shade. They prefer growing in the shade. When they like a spot, they put up sprouts around them and become a patch.

In the spring the flowers open facing the ground. They attract flies and beetles as pollinators. There must be two different trees, not another sprout, for pollination.

amazing pawpaw cluster
I hate climbing up ladders and needed to go up one more rung to get eleven fruits in the picture. One is always hidden in the back or underneath. Even with only nine showing, this is an amazing pawpaw cluster. It is not two clusters joined together, but a single cluster. Now we need to keep checking on it to pick it before the resident groundhog with a burrow at the base of the tree gets it. All of the fruits are still hard. As soon as they start to soften, we can pick the cluster.

Fruits

The clusters of green potatoes soften and take on a yellow tinge in late summer to early fall. Usually there are three or four fruits in a cluster. This year we have an amazing pawpaw cluster of twelve!

We pick the fruits as soon as they soften. They ripen on the windowsill. Once they are soft, we can eat the custardy insides discarding the large seeds. If any are left over, they make great sweet breads.

Those left on the trees are soon chewed on. We aren’t the only ones who like the sweet, custardy fruits. Deer, raccoons, opossums, foxes and others like them too.

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Finding Wildflowers

This is the busiest time of summer with putting food by for the winter and planting the fall garden as summer plants are ready to remove. Hiking the hills is not often on the schedule which leaves me finding wildflowers in different places.

finding wildflowers gave me this new bur marigold
Gardens attract lots of wild plants better known as weeds. Some are immediately pulled. Others are allowed to grow just to see what they are. This bur marigold turned out to be a pretty wildflower.

In the Garden

Wild plants want to grow and gardens are ideal spots. Gardens have open, rich soil. Water arrives often. Competition is minimal as vegetables get harvested regularly.

My garden hosts a variety of wild plants such as chickweed, dead nettle, dock, English plantain, wayside speedwell, two morning glories, evening primrose, chicory, bulbous buttercup and daisy fleabane. There are others and some occasional visitors such as pokeweed.

A friend asked me about a plant in her garden with lovely orange flowers. It reminds me of a marigold, but is one of the bur marigolds. There are several, but most have tiny rays people often call petals. I have pictures and will identify it later.

floating primrose flower
When finding wildflowers, the searcher needs to be on the lookout all the time. This floating primrose grows around the end of a lake put in near a house. Probably ducks or geese stopped on the small lake and dropped off the seeds. I spotted it by looking down after taking a picture of a pink rose mallow flower.

Other Places

Finding wildflowers is mostly a matter of watching for them. I love driving with no one following me as I can go slowly and look over the plants along the roads. Wild sunflowers are blooming now and I’m looking for new ones.

Across from my friend’s house is a large pond. Her ducks moved over to it. Around it are several clumps of pink rose mallow.

I’m sure these clumps were planted there. However rose mallow, the white ones, grow wild in several places. There are wild pink ones down toward where the witch hazel I visited in the spring, but that takes a morning to go to.

The planted pink rose mallows will do as examples of a color variant. So I traipsed across the road. The mallow wasn’t the only wildflower there.

The Yerba de Tajo was one I’d found at ShawneeMac Lakes. The yellow one was new. I very much doubt it was planted there. That adds floating primrose to my Dent County Flora.

Most of my produce I’m saving is stuffed into my freezer now along with the extra roosters. Okra and one more package of chopped peppers will finish packing the freezers.

Once the fall garden is planted, maybe I can go back to hiking the hills finding wildflowers.

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Giant Sunflowers

The roadsides are lined with yellow and orange wild sunflowers of many kinds. This year giant sunflowers are growing in my garden.

Last Year

Seed catalogs have lots of pictures of many varieties of sunflowers. Most are strictly pretty flowers. A few will produce edible seeds.

Some of these are giant sunflowers growing to ten feet or more. A packet of Mongolian Giants was added to the seed order just for fun.

Wind can be a problem for tall plants. After some thought, I placed the sunflowers along a tall deer fence so I could tie them up, if necessary.

The problem was how edible sunflowers are. Deer reached through the fence. Groundhogs crawled through. Only one plant, hidden inside yet another wire ring, survived.

This plant grew tall although a few leaves disappeared. It produced a large flower head. No bird even looked at this treat as every seed was empty.

giant sunflowers
Watching these giant sunflower plants get taller and taller is fun. The flowerheads seem to start small and get bigger. It’s a good thing they are against a fence as the flowers made the plants top heavy. I’ve had a couple tall over and tied the others to increase support for them.

This Year

I had left over seeds. A different fence was selected, an interior one. And the plants grew. And grew.

Giant sunflowers are giants. Some of these must be ten feet tall and tower over me as well as the tomatoes growing on the other side of the fence and the okra trying to grow alongside of them.

Now these giants are blooming. Interestingly, the heads open only about six inches across then steadily get bigger. They start facing out toward the sun and later bend down.

Just For Fun

Although we like eating sunflower seeds, there won’t be enough to last very long. The birds will probably get many of the seeds as the flower heads are too far overhead to bag.

The packets boast how tall the plants get. I remember county fair entries of these as people vied for who could grow the tallest ones.

We won’t enter these in any fairs as our county fairs are now past. However, these giant sunflowers have been fun to grow.

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My Ozark Creek

After two days dealing with baling and putting hay in the barn, I was tired. The day was warm and overcast so a walk down to visit the goats and explore my Ozark creek seemed a good idea.

This idea had another appeal to it. As I write about the Ship Nineteen Carduans, their creek, which they consider a river, is a place they go to often.

a section of my Ozark creek
This section of my Ozark creek is wider than I can jump, but it’s definitely a creek. But then, I’m five feet tall. If I were four inches tall like the Carduans I’m writing about, this same creek would seem very wide and deep and look much more like a river.

My Ozark Creek

Most of the creek banks are steep drops where high water and flood waters have scoured out the dirt. Roots hang out of these cuts. When enough of a tree’s roots are undercut, the tree begins to lean, then falls.

Once you are down the bank, the creek bottom stretches out. Much of this area is paved with gravel left behind as the water carries the soil away.

Water levels vary according to the rain. As I look over this part of the creek, it is more a series of pools with small streams of running water flowing between them than what might normally be considered a creek.

Some pools are broad and less than a foot deep. Other pools are deep cuts often where trees have been uprooted. Fish and crawdads inhabit the pools.

A wide variety of plants live along the creek. The trees are mostly sycamores with their white trunks studded with brown puzzle pieces and willows, black and Carolina. Underneath the trees is a mix. I notice jewelweed with its orange earring flowers dangling, a pink swamp milkweed, purple self heal and hog peanut vines draped over much of it.

my Ozark creek forms pools
Gravel moved into this area of my Ozark creek during the last flood. The young tree in the bank is undercut and a pool has formed under it. Broad Head Minnows swim back and forth through the pool. It’s deep enough for some of them to reach six inches long.

The Carduans

Food is a constant need for the Carduans of Ship Nineteen. The creek they find is a place to catch fish and crawdads.

There are stones to use for building. Honey locust trees supply thorns. Willows supply slender canes for making chairs.

When I wear boots, the creek is easy to cross. The Carduans, at four inches tall, find the creek is often deeper than they are tall. All of us think it is a great place to spend an afternoon.

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Oodles of Tomatoes

I will admit I probably over planted tomatoes. Every year I vow to cut back. And every year I end up with oodles of tomatoes.

Reasons to Cut Back

Two people can only eat so many tomatoes. Even the chickens and the wildlife can get overwhelmed by oodles of tomatoes.

Tomatoes take a lot of water. Ozark summers are often dry and I don’t have a convenient hose.

Tomatoes are a popular sales item for both sellers and buyers at the Farmers Market. However, lots go home again.

Speckled Roman paste tomato
Paste tomatoes have less water in them. I like the flavor of the Speckled Roman paste tomatoes. It is an indeterminate tomato, an heirloom, and prolific. The tomatoes are not uniform, but tend to be up to 7 inches long and 1 1/2 inches in diameter. This year I’m getting lots of shorter, but stouter ones. I slice them into rounds to cook them up for sauce or placing on cream cheese pizza.

Reasons For Growing So Many Tomatoes

My garden typically has three main types of tomatoes: red, yellow and paste. These are started from seed as I like varieties not commonly available.

There are also some purchased tomatoes as these will bear sooner. And a couple of cherry tomatoes are nice for snacks. One is by the house. The other is in the garden.

Things happen to gardens. Groundhogs. Chipmunks. Wood rats. Birds. Insects. Disease. Having a few more plants than necessary is insurance against total loss.

Gold King of the North Oxheart Tomato
This is an extra tomato for me this year. These tomatoes are huge with the characteristic oxheart shape. The vines are indeterminate and prolific. I find the taste a bit bland. The tomatoes seem to bruise easily.

What To Do With Oodles of Tomatoes

All dinner menus are now planned with tomatoes included. Sliced. Salads. Enchiladas. Spaghetti.

More tomatoes end up as sauce, broth and frozen. A few years back I tried freezing plain nice tomatoes. These are great as thawing them makes the skins slide off. If I’m doing chili, I only want one or two, not a bag of sauce.

When I make tomato sauce, I read the directions to boil skinned tomatoes down for hours until they are a thick sauce. First, I’m lousy at skinning tomatoes. Second, I hate spending that much time boiling off water. (Tomatoes are 95% water, more than watermelon at 92%. See the Pumpkin Project.)

My sauce is plain tomatoes, trimmed and cut into chunks, dropped into a large pot and simmered until soft mush. Then I use a colander to separate the pulp from the liquid tomato broth.

The liquid is frozen as broth. The pulp is pureed in the blender, then frozen. When I thaw these out, I can add the appropriate herbs, spices and salt for the recipe I am making.

Even so, this is a great tomato year. My garden is happily producing oodles of tomatoes. I hope it lasts to frost and beyond stored in the pantry and freezer.

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Making Feta Goat Cheese

Making feta goat cheese hasn’t been on my list of things to do for years. It wasn’t supposed to be on the list now.

There has been a special request. I went hunting for my recipe and dredging my memory for how to make this cheese.

Special Supplies

I’ve made several changes in the regular feta recipes I’ve read. The set curds do need to have the whey pressed out. This can be with a cheese press. I use my hands and a colander.

There is a special feta cheese starter. I’ve never used it. Instead I will use buttermilk from the market. It works well for making feta goat cheese, although it changes the flavor a little.

The other supplies are the same as for other cheeses I make: a whisk, a long spatula, a stirring spoon, a stainless steel pot, stainless steel colander, vegetable rennet. Canning salt is used too, but as a brine. I dump a couple of cups of salt into a gallon jug and fill it with water. This is enough for two or three batches of cheese.

My Recipe

My pot holds about a gallon and a half of milk, so that is how much I use. This can be fresh or from the day before. Either way, the milk is warmed to 86 degrees. The heat is turned off.

Then a quarter cup of buttermilk is whisked into the milk. The lid is put on and the mixture is allowed to sit for an hour.

Rennet is whisked in. The curd is allowed to set up and should take about half an hour.

The curd is cut as for mozzarella: across both ways and diagonal both ways, and allowed to set for five minutes. Now the curd is gently stirred for fifteen minutes. After the first five, time really drags.

This stirring is important as it separates the curds and whey. You will see the curds shrink in size.

Now the colander comes into play to drain the whey from the curds. The curds should be firm enough to roll the colander to drain the whey as much as possible. Press the curds into a cake.

making feta goat cheese takes time
It takes some time to cut the feta into cubes, but the cubes soak up the brine better than a big piece. However, the cubes like being in one lump and will stick together while sitting in the brine. They are broken apart again while running cold water over them to wash off the brine. They will continue to ooze whey and brine even after being washed and drained. Just dump the liquid out of the container you put the cheese into.

Salting the Cheese

Turn the curd mass out onto a plate. The mass is cut into roughly half inch cubes. These are put into a bowl. More whey will come out. Keep dumping it to avoid a flooded counter.

Pour brine over the pile of cubes. Set the plate on top of the bowl. Place the bowl in the refrigerator for several hours.

Supposedly the time spent in the brine doesn’t matter. I prefer to get the cubes out after three to four hours.

Dump the cubes into the colander. Rinse them with cold water. Drain the water and refrigerate the cubes of feta, ready to use.

Making feta goat cheese isn’t hard. It is time consuming. I find it too salty for my taste which is why I don’t usually make it.

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Making Mozzarella Goat Cheese

There are lots of recipes around for making mozzarella goat cheese. The one I’ve come up with works well for me.

One of the important things to remember is to start with milk a day or two old and cold in the refrigerator. This cheese likes to be slightly acid and this seems to do the trick.

It is possible to add a bit of citric acid to get that acidity. I’ve done that. It’s hard to judge how much to add and too much will make the cheese very rubbery.

Supplies Needed

When I get ready for making mozzarella goat cheese, I put my stainless steel pot on the stove and fill it with milk. This cheese works best for at least a gallon of milk. Any more I use a gallon and a half, but have worked with two gallons. More than two gallons becomes a problem for me later on.

Turning the stove on low to warm the milk, I set out a Pyrex bowl with a stainless steel colander sitting in it. Next to that is a Pyrex loaf pan to put the finished cheese in.

There is a stainless steel flat canning ladle, a stainless steel flat spatula, a whisk and a cheese thermometer. I use vegetable rennet to set the curd and canning salt.

cover for "Goat Games" by Karen GoatKeeper
Surrounded by lots of goat information and puzzles are recipes for making cheese and other things from goat milk as well as how to cook chevon (goat meat).

Making the Cheese

The milk is heated to 86 degrees. Don’t get more than a degree sloppy with this. Turn off the heat. Whisk in enough rennet to set the curd in about 30 minutes. Put the lid on and wait.

Once the curd is set, use the spatula to cut the curd. First make long cuts every quarter to half inch one way. Next make long cuts across the first ones to make columns. Last use the spatula at an angle to cut the columns first one way, then the other.

The idea is to break the curd up into smaller pieces to make it easier to get the whey out.

Let the cut curd sit for 5 minutes. Then sprinkle canning salt over the top of the curds using a tablespoon per half gallon of milk.

Start slowly heating the curd. Gently stir the curd to mix in the salt and shift the curds from the bottom of the pan to the top. Do this slowly so you don’t break the curds into lots of tiny pieces.

making mozzarella goat cheese
Pictures were on the agenda as I set up to make this week’s batch of mozzarella cheese. The pictures didn’t get taken. And the cheese started disappearing. The camera finally arrived before the last bit of cheese got eaten.

Setting the Cheese

Let the curds heat. Mix the curds every 5 minutes or so to spread the heat more evenly. The curds will shrink as they release whey. They will change and toughen.

The original directions said to heat the curds to 120 degrees. I rarely get that hot. I watch the curds until they get a rubbery, melted look to them.

Now lift the curds out of the whey into the colander. The curds from two gallons of milk fill my colander. Leave the whey heating on the stove.

Rinse your hands in cold water even if you are wearing gloves. Turn the curds in the colander to drain more whey out. I empty whey back into the pot as I go.

Lift the mass up and it should stretch down toward the colander draining more whey. Fold it and let it stretch again several times. (If it won’t stretch, put the mass into the hot whey to get hotter so it will stretch.)

Press the cheese into the loaf pan or whatever mold you are using. I let it cool a bit on the counter before covering and refrigerating it.

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Making Vinegar Set Ricotta Cheese

Dairy goats giving milk must be milked out regularly or they will stop giving milk. As the refrigerator fills with milk, the question is what to do with this milk. Making vinegar set ricotta cheese is one possibility.

This cheese is considered to be a good beginner’s cheese. It takes few ingredients, is forgiving of sloppy temperatures and can be used in lots of ways.

Cheese Making Equipment

Any cheese makes whey which quickly becomes acidic. A stainless steel stock pot is important. I use a two gallon pot. When I made more kinds of cheese in larger quantities, I had a six gallon pot.

If the pot has bolt heads inside the pot, the milk level should always be below them as they are not stainless steel. The pot must have a lid.

A cheese thermometer is a must. Although making vinegar set ricotta cheese has a wide temperature range, most cheeses have a specific setting temperature. Cheese temperatures range from 70 to 200 degrees.

For making vinegar set ricotta cheese my utensils include a stainless steel whisk, a measuring cup, plastic or glass, and a stainless steel colander. The white vinegar comes from the market.

Making Vinegar Set Ricotta Cheese

Making vinegar set ricotta cheese starts with setting the curds
Whisking the vinegar into the hot milk causes the curds to coagulate and separate from the whey. This can take a minute. Just keep stirring. It makes the mixture look lumpy. If the curds are very fine, it will look grainy.

This is a forgiving cheese as I’ve said. The milk can come straight in from the milk room and be strained into the pot. It can be cold milk from the refrigerator.

Fill your pot and slowly heat it. It’s a good idea to keep the lid on so the milk doesn’t skin as it gets hot.

Every so often use the whisk to stir the milk so it heats more evenly. Check the temperature each time. You want the milk to reach 175 to 185 degrees.

Once the milk is hot, whisk in the vinegar. I find a half cup per gallon works for me. This, too, is lenient. You can add a bit more to set the milk harder.

You should see the milk turn grainy as the vinegar and milk mix. The grains can vary in size from tiny to quarter inch or larger. They stick to the whisk so you can see them. You should see the milk separate into curds and whey.

When I made lemon cheesecake from the cheese, I set the milk with lemon juice. It takes more than the vinegar and has a lower yield.

Turn off the heat. Put the lid on the pot. Let the pot sit and cool down.

vinegar set ricotta goat cheese
Unlike many cheeses, the amount of milk used for vinegar set ricotta cheese is highly variable. As I wanted new pictures for this post, I made a big saucepan of cheese to add to the cheese I made a couple of days ago to make enchiladas. Just adjust the amount of vinegar added. This is a very bland cheese so added spices and herbs really dress it up to suit whatever recipe you are making. For the enchiladas I added chopped garlic chives. Chopped onion and peppers work well too. I prefer using the vinegar set ricotta cheese to cream cheese in most recipes as I can add flavors to it easily. It can be used like cottage cheese. This is a very versatile cheese.

Rescuing Your Cheese

The curds settle into a soft mass. Use the colander to separate the curds and whey. You can keep the whey to use for pasta or even feed your goats. You can water the grass.

If the curds are very fine, line the colander with nylon netting. I prefer this to cheesecloth as the weave is fixed and it is very easy to wash. The small curds drain very slowly and the resulting cheese will spoil faster.

Larger curds can be rolled around in the colander to drain out as much of the whey as you can.

Either way, refrigerate the curds. Then start planning those lasagnas, quiches, cheesecakes and more to use up your goat cheese.

cover for "Goat Games" by Karen GoatKeeper

There are more cheese recipes in “Goat Games”. Pumpkin cheesecake is one of the recipes in “The Pumpkin Project”.

Next week will be a mozzarella type cheese.

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Time For Cheese Again

Three kids are sold and gone. The two wethers and two bucks are left and still gorging on milk. But there is enough leftover now and it’s time for cheese again.

As with so many things, I no longer do a lot of cheese or kinds of cheese. Every Monday I do a small batch of a mozzarella type. Occasionally I do the vinegar set ricotta

Milk Is the Beginning

Most cheese directions begin in the kitchen. I prefer to start in the milk room as cheese actually begins with milk.

Ozark summers bring warm mornings. These in turn sour milk. This does not make good cheese or table milk for that matter.

Some years back I tried to come up with a way for cool my milk before it even made it into the kitchen. This matters as warm milk takes a long time to cool down in the refrigerator and makes it work harder, not a good thing with older refrigerators in a hot kitchen.

My solution was to freeze a juice bottle of water. This is placed in the milk tote when I go out. The warm milk cools a lot as the ice melts inside the bottle.

When you try this, remember water expands about ten percent when it freezes, so leave room in the bottle. Use a thicker plastic juice bottle, 20 ounce. Tighten the lid securely.

goats are milking, time for cheese again
It’s easy to think cheese recipes only matter in the kitchen. Cheese actually begins in the barn. My hard working (Ha!) Nubian does come in at milking time to gobble up their grain and other treats. Pieces of apple, corn husks, lettuce leaves and other things are appreciated. Pumpkin and squash pieces are big favorites. In return I get milk from which I can make cheese.

Pasteurizing

I made this mistake once. My cheese never set. If you do pasteurize, you will need starters for the milk to replace what the heat killed.

My cheese is made from raw milk. Yes, raw milk can carry diseases. However, I know my goats and don’t use milk from goats feeling ill.

Another check is how long the milk stays good in the refrigerator. Mine stays good for over a week. I keep my equipment clean, my glass bottles clean and put the milk up as soon as I get in from the milk room.

Now It’s Time for Cheese Again

Next week I’ll post about making fresh milk ricotta. I don’t make big batches any more so I’ll start with three quarts of fresh milk, just in from the milk room.