Category: Latest From High Reaches

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Latest From High Reaches

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.

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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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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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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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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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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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My Favorite Tree

While browsing through the picture book shelves, I came across “My Favorite Tree” by Diane Iverson. This isn’t really a picture book for young children, but a book about trees for older children.

Each two page spread has one picture book side with something about why the children in the picture like that particular kind of tree. The other page gives the name, description, range map, trivia and champion tree.

Looking at Trees

Now, I like trees. They have lovely shapes. Their shade is very welcome on hot days. Some have beautiful flowers and great fruit.

My problem with trees is how big they are. I can’t even reach the lowest branches of most trees. Climbing them has never been something I want to do.

My favorite tree in late spring is the dogwood
After the wild plums turn white with flowers and the redbuds don their pink slippers, the dogwood spreads its white clouds in the woods.

Tree Appreciation

A newspaper article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch reiterated something I also read about in Science News. Trees are very valuable in the city.

Trees cut noise, absorb pollution, cool hot temperatures and make people feel better. Cities should find ways to plant more trees. The suggestion for St. Louis was to plant trees on some of the abandoned house lots after removing the condemned structures. Most cities have such places and a small neighborhood park would increase property values for surrounding houses.

Which is My Favorite Tree?

As I read through “My Favorite Tree”, I asked this question. So many of the trees listed were ones I was familiar with. The pages brought back many memories.

Standing in the midst of a redwood grove. Sniffing pine trees for the scent of vanilla as Ponderosa Pines smell of vanilla and Jeffery Pines don’t. Fir forests looking like Christmas in a blanket of snow. Saguaros standing like sentries across the desert. Stopping under a Joshua Tree to take a picture of it and my new car.

Other trees are familiar ones around my home. Redbuds with their pink slippers that taste nutty. Dogwoods spreading white clouds in the woods. Persimmons and sycamores giving fruit and leaves to tempt the goats. Gathering black walnuts.

My answer really was that it depends on which tree I am focusing on at that time. In spite of their great height towering over me, I like trees.

white oak in winter
One of the interesting sights in winter are the shapes of the various trees now bereft of leaves. Different kinds of trees have different shapes. Trees growing close together change their shapes to compliment each other.

Using This Book

The trees listed are from many places and no one will see them all close to home. But the book offers a way to entice children outdoors to take a look at these mighty neighbors, learn their names and find out more about them.

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Noisy Country

There is a mistaken belief that the country is quiet and peaceful. Maybe it is at some times. Right now the noisy country is in full swing.

tree frog waiting for dark
Easily mistaken for a lump of mud and hoping to be ignored, this gray tree frog sat near my trays of seedlings all day. I would prefer that it was a bit more active in the bug eating realm. It was resting up for a night calling from the neighboring rain barrel.

Tree Frogs

The house is ringed with rain barrels. We use the water for plants inside and outside the house.

Looking around the house there are these gray mottled lumps tucked into nooks. Closer inspection shows these are frogs, gray tree frogs. They don’t seem to do anything all day. It would be nice if they would snack on some of the flying insects zipping by them.

As evening approaches, these frogs migrate to the rain barrels. They think the barrels are there just for them. One or more line up along the top edges. By dark the chorus is in full voice, almost loud enough to drown out any converstaion or other noise near them.

City people find this annoying. Noisy country frogs make sleeping impossible.

Whip Poor Will

One lone whip poor will still comes to the valley. He claims the valley as his own, moving from place to place calling whip poor will over and over.

This year the bird begins calling at eight thirty and continues until dawn. I can listen while I milk. Some nights he sits just outside the milk room to serenade me.

noisy country culprit: red-eyed cicada
Every year the green annual cicadas announce summer’s arrival in the Ozarks in June to July. The red-eyed cicadas appear in their thousands only rarely. They are earlier than the annual invasion. Last time they hung on bushes and trees all over the hills. This year they fly up into the trees where they are heard, but not seen. This one stuck around long enough for a couple of pictures, then flew off to join the chorus.

Cicadas

This year the cicadas are already buzzing from the time the sun lights up the trees to sunset every day. These are the ones that emerge every thirteen or seventeen years.

Usually the annual cicadas don’t start emerging and calling until June or July. Their chorus is louder.

People

I’ve heard people complain about the noisy country sounds. Then they drive down the road with their radios blaring. I can hear them laughing and shouting for a quarter mile as they pass the house. Then the four wheelers and side-by-sides with no mufflers come roaring by.

Given the option, I far prefer my noisy country filled with cicadas, tree frogs and birds to the noise people make.

More of the wildlife is featured in essays in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.

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Flash Flood Aftermath

The big storm srrived in the Ozarks and left use ith a good two inches. It seemed to be over until we got up in the morning to find the flash flood aftermath staring at us out the window.

How both of us managed to sleep through what must have been a downpour, puzzles us. Perhaps we were more tired than we realized.

flash flood aftermath damages fences
The main part of the flood had gone by morning. The debris line on the road indicated the water was at least 18 inches deep where it crossed the road. Water still flowed down over half the road as it sought to get to the creek. This area of fence has a place for the water to get through. However the water brought down leaves and small branches which caught in the fence. Road gravel piled up with the leaves. The water pushed hard and the posts leaned over as the water topped the debris to get into the pasture.

The Road

A small wet weather flow comes down along the yard. It was still running in the morning, but the debris indicated it had been over a foot deep overnight.

The water carried mulch left by the electric company, leaves and small branches down across the road, down the road, covering most of the road. Some of the water diverted down an old creek bed into the buck’s small pasture.

Field fence is great fencing for goats. It’s a disaster in a flood.

The flash flood aftermath at the fence was a heap of small branches, leaves and shredded wood piled up against the fence. The only way to clear this mess is to wade in, pull up armloads and dump it over the fence.

flash flood aftermath debris on bridge
Weather changes have made flash floods more the rule than the exception for several years here in the Ozarks. These rise quickly, tear out the creek banks and subside fast. This latest one didn’t top what remains of the bridge, only topped it enough to pile it with branches, leaves and whatever is tangled in these. Such floods used to carry off the bridge planks, but there are several old railroad ties on one side now to hold them in place. So far, these are working.

The Bridge

After the previous two inches of rain, the creek was flowing strongly. The more than two inch downpour brought the creek up over the edges of the bridge where it piled up branches and leaves.

This means working my way across the bridge one pile at a time. The leaves and small stuff can be shoved off into the creek with a hoe. Larger branches and small pieces of trees must be pulled up, shoved across and into the creek to lodge somewhere else doesn the way.

Animals

The flash flood aftermath was almost tragic for the Canada geese. Their nest is down in the creek floodplain. The flood waters came within a foot of sweeping it away.

I found a few creatures in the debris on the bridge. A snail was tossed over onto the grass across the creek. A spider ran off. A small midland brown snake was carried up to a brush pile and turned loose.

How many other creatures were swept away? There’s no way of knowing. A flash flood aftermath may mean lots of cleaning up for us, but it’s a disaster for small creatures.