With a snowboarding trip, friends in town, rainy weekends, and work being acquired, I haven’t found a lot of time to tend to the hops in a while (or update – it’s been a month!), but they have been growing like crazy! Here’s what it looked like yesterday
The center plant, my Chinook, is still the leader of the pack – it’s shoots had grown past the training twine, and still going!
It’s tough to see from the photos just how big that Chinook plant is, so for some perspective, it’s taller than a 6′2″ dude with and his mighty fro -
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It’s leaves are bigger than my hand -
And the stalk is thicker than Georges Head -
It was definitely time for some maintenance. Everything I’ve read has said that for a healthy harvest, only 2 – 3 authorized shoots should be allowed to grow, so that the plant can concentrate it’s energy on keeping those vines healthy. Also, the latest issue of BYO had a trick I hadn’t seen before, but sounded good – hops like to keep growing vertically, so if they get taller than the vertical space available, you should be able to add more twine, and just let the grown vine droop, even allowing it to coil at the base. The article was concentrating on growing hops in pots (more on that later), but as I don’t have any more space vertically, and I can’t really put anything up that would allow it to be that tall, but grow horizontally (along the top of the ‘fence’), I thought I’d give it a try. The idea I got from the article was that eventually, even the coiled vine would produce cones, so you’d get a bigger harvest and healthier plants by allowing them to keep growing vertically.
So, I trimmed the unauthorized shoots -
And added more twine to allow for more vertical growth -
I hope I did everything correctly, but I’m a bit nervous – the healthy vine is now right on the ground,
I’m afraid I just made it easy access to bugs. With the trimming of the ground vines, I’m also eliminating some potential production space, as well as totally committing to those ‘authorized’ vines – now, if I mess up on those, I don’t have any backups. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…
