We’ve finally made it to last year’s foals (minus the early intro that we did for Zake (20) before he went to his new home)!

This is HF Lacey’s Orange Appled.  We call her Apple.

Early April last year, BH Silver Lace (Lacey) and San Cler Nazareth of Bellissima Farms (Naz) gave us our friendliest filly to date.  She was born very white with minimal orange markings and bright, sky-blue eyes.  DNA results showed that she was a Silver Bay Tobiano Sabino filly with one H2 gene.  She’s the only living horse we could find currently registered with that combination at GVHS.  If you ever happily and excitedly say that you have something unique or close to unique, though, there’s generally a chorus of naysayers ready to line up to tell you that you are wrong online (but the fact still remains, she’s the only living one registered as such with GVHS that we’ve been able to locate…take that naysayers!).

Our original projections for her, since she seemed to take heavily after her 14.3hh-ish dam was that she might be in the 14.2hh range, but we now know (very recently) that with that H2 gene, she’ll likely be somewhere around 13.2 to 13.3hh fully-grown.

Apple came out loving humans.  She’s very “in your pocket,” and if you allow her to be, she often is literally in the pockets of your coat, nibbling on your sleeves, licking your pant-legs, and nibbling on your arms, hands, and fingers.  Some people really dislike horses that are “all up in your face” like that, but we don’t mind.  She just needs to be with the right people that do not mind that or the right people that will provide the proper guidance for her to act more like they want her to act.  She’s not opposed to changing her ways.

I don’t even remember a time when we couldn’t just walk up to her and toss a halter on her.  She doesn’t seem to have any kind of resistance to our handling of her (doesn’t make her the smartest horse, but it really endears her to us).

Very, very early on in her baby training (the first two weeks), she thought it was a fun game to play with the humans by backing up and rearing.  She quickly learned that that game is only fun with other horses and not humans.  She was never aggressive with it…just too playful with the wrong sort of play.  Even a baby can hurt humans with that sort of play, though.

She’s a willing filly and game for any kind of games you want to play with her.  She’s always done well for the farrier (farriers are always pulling out new and interesting tools to explore and always have interesting new odors).  It’s probably a little bit annoying to work with a horse that is sniffing all over you and nibbling on your backside half the time, though.

We advertised her.  We had a few tire-kickers ask questions about her, but we had no real solid leads for her finding new pastures.  It was a difficult year for selling foals in 2023.  We sold two of our four, but Apple remained with us.  After the holiday season, we threw in the towel with trying to sell her, and we’re now committed to keeping her around for longer and putting additional training and manners on her.  We honestly haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do with Apple.  We are glad that she didn’t sell as an EMH 14.2hh horse, since that might upset a buyer in the future if she didn’t reach that size.  We take our reputation very seriously.  We cannot breed her with our stallion, Benz, for reasons that will be soon clear when I introduce him, and if we took her over into Mason’s paddock, half the time, she’d have a foal that would reach 14.2hh and the other half of the time, 13.2hh.  We also do not want to, for reasons previously stated, keep fillies born after 2022.  Apple is a “wait and see” for us right now.  Either she will find a new forever home someday or we will change our mind on our retention policy or make an exception for just her.  Time will tell.