East Kentucky Fibers

I’m calling them Omie Wise (left) and Mary Hamilton (right). I bought them from Sierra Hoover, a very nice lady who runs Fairy Tale Farm in Rowan County. She’s been helping me look for land and plan out a farm of my own and I’ve been going trail riding with her and her husband. If you were thinking that these little fillies are too young to go trail riding, you’re correct, so I bought a 6 year old mare called Rain. I didn’t name her that, I don’t know what I would have picked, but that’s the name she came with, so it’ll do!

The other day I brushed out omie’s hair, it was totally matted with burrs. When I finally got them all out of her white hair, it was a giant fuzzball and I, luckily, had my camera in the car to take a picture:

The little girls have warts on their noses, by the way. They’re pretty nasty, but they’ll grow out of them.

I did a wee bit of canning a few weeks ago:

That’ll be the sweetest fruit of all in a few months.

My mother had fun playing with fire (big surprise):

Karly and I went up to Black Mountain after the masquerade ball at appalshop. It was neat up there, the highest point in Kentucky, but there were lots of awful sights around:I’ve been making lots of life plans recently. I’m planning on spending the spring semester in the UK somewhere instead of in Morehead. I’ve applied at the National University of Ireland in Galway, but I’m thinking that I might abandon that idea and do my own things instead. I’m trying to arrange an apprenticeship at a gypsy horse farm over there, I could work for (hopefully) room and board and get to learn all about raising horses. When I come back in early summer I’ll dive into farming. Sierra has stressed the importance of having a diverse farm, so I’d like to try and get a few breeding gypsy horses and KY mountain horses together and also do Rambouillet sheep, cotswold sheep, chickens, and pigs. I’m considering cattle and turkeys also. I wont have a glut of any of these things, just enough to make a little bit of profit off of. I think I would do well with meat animals even just around here, everybody always talks about how much they want clean meat, I could probably make a living just off the number of people I’ve actually heard say that. We’ll see how it goes!