Catching Up

It seems all my blog posts have this title, or should.  I have just been falling behind on keeping you folks informed as to the goings on of the ranch, but things are progressing.

Grandma is now almost completely retired and thinking of making a permanent move to the south.  I would love to keep her around but she has earned her retirement and really wants to spend time traveling and developing her photography hobby.  So, it probably won't be long and I will be on my own to run things.  It used to scare me, but it has become almost second nature now.  I have such great help and I have cut the herd by about a third now, so it is much easier to manage.  I am working on developing high quality show horses for Western and Draft.  Breeding has been kept to the bare minimum and I am working on incorporating some of the great stallions I run into in my travels to the different shows.  So far it seems to be working well. 

Laiko is my first experiment in this area, a lovely dark bay silver rabicano tobiano boy, who trains as well as he looks.  He is out of my own Pop Music and by Grecian Fire bred by the great Wingbeat Stables.

Laiko

I started saddle training him at 23 months, as he seemed quite mature and well developed for his age.  It was a risk but I took it easy on him, spending 40 minutes working on walking out, whoa and turning, then 20 minutes lunging.  He showed huge changes within a month and walks out and stops like a pro!  Next month will be spent working on turning both directions and some more lunging for now. 

I am also very happy to announce that we have a new Beginner Champion, the gorgeous Ruby Queene.  She is a homebred out of GCh Saffira by our great WCh Panama.  She would probably be much further along if I had not been working so hard on learning to run the ranch and getting my training methods down.  But I am trying to be diligent about entering shows every month now, so hopefully she continues to run through the brackets like she did with beginner.  She was gettings scores of over 82 points, which I find to be quite impressive! 

BCh Ruby Queene

 
I also have my first foal due out of my first homebred Ardennais mare, miss Mabel.  She is bred to an amazing local stock stallion, Hidden Flyer.  I am hoping for incredible strength out of this pairing, but we will see what happens. 

I also have some lovely mares moving along in their showing careers and all my drafts in beginner levels are doing great!  I will try to update more regularly from now on.  Grandma has been nagging at me, but now that things have slowed down a bit, hopefully she won't have to.