Category: Latest From High Reaches

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Latest From High Reaches

Putting the Garden to Bed

Fall is a difficult time for a gardener like me. The summer garden is shutting down, but is still producing a little. Frost is imminent along with the death of summer crops. Do I leave the crops a few more days or pull them? Putting the garden to bed for the winter is next on my list.

Unhappy Peppers

Peppers like night temperatures above sixty followed by warmer days. Night temperatures in the forties are disliked intensely.

Many of my pepper plants are now looking like they are wilting. The soil is moist. They are starting to die. Peppers still hang on their branches trying to ripen.

Tomatoes may like the same night temperatures, but many of those plants are growing happily. Their tomatoes may not be as flavorful as summer ones, but they are much better than anything from the store.

The long beans too are shutting down. There are still some beans growing on them. It is time to pull the vines.

Ajvar Pepper, Macedonian sweet pepper
Ajvar peppers are from Macedonia. They are thick walled and sweet. This one is hard to beat on the grill. I halve, clean and roast them at 350 degrees until they wilt. Seeds are available from Bakers Creek.

Goat Treats

My goats are another factor in this decision to close up the summer garden. There are plants they like to munch on like long beans, peppers, sweet potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes. Tomatoes are not on their list.

I will pull the bean vines and the pepper plants soon while they are still green. The sweet potatoes get dug just before the forecast calls for frost. Once the goats are finished munching on them, I will add them to the compost pile.

The Jerusalem artichokes are a problem. They are over twelve feet tall with thick stems. Perhaps I will cut tops off first, then the main stem.

Putting the Garden to Bed

This may sound like the end of the garden. It isn’t. It is the beginning of next year’s garden.

Now is when I add compost and top with mulch. This adds nutrients to the garden and discourages weeds. Spring is not that far away.

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Persimmons Are Falling

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

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

Lazy Summer

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Arrives

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

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

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

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

Goat Treats

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

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

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

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Goldenrods Are Blooming

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

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

How Many?

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

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

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

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

One Patch Missing

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

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

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

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

Other Roadside Attractions

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

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

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

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

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Molting Time

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

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

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

Examining Feathers

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

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

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

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

Other Feathers

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

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

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

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

Tail Feathers

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

Molting Time Problem

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

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

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

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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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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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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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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.