Brewlog » Garden

Hop Garden update/ Spring Cleaning

Deez — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:18:01 +0000

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…

Super Hops!

Deez — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:49:55 +0000

It’s been less than a week since the last hop update, and they went nuts this week! We had a good combination of sun and rain – typical springtime, and either the weather, or a radioactive spider, or some sort of cosmic radiation storm must have transformed my ‘pretty good’ looking plants into mutant organic superplants. All three hop varieties are now looking great, with the Chinook still on overdrive. I’ll get some twine up for the other two, and start training them to move vertically. I can’t wait to see what the next update will look like!

Good Day

Deez — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 04:17:59 +0000

It was pretty close to 70 degrees up here on Sunday, and the first time Portland or I have been that warm since last summer/ early fall. We had a good productive, fun day. Along with getting the lawn mowed and some weeds pulled, I got a simple ‘trellis’ set up for my Chinook Hop plant – it’s still doing the best of the 3 plants, though all three are looking promising. Once the gang arrived, our awesome bottling team both bottled the last batch of brew (Nosferatu’s Return), and got a new batch of beer made (Bastard Rye IPA) – this one’s destined for the keg. I’ll post the recipe next. After brewing, we lit up the grill and pretended like it was summer. Here’s some pics from the day…

Spring!

Deez — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:02:14 +0000

It’s the first day of spring, and it’s definitely starting to warm up a bit. I’ve begun to see some flowers, and a few cherry blossoms blooming around town, and I’m pretty sure the lawn’s starting to grow again. Most exciting though, was the discovery I made today in our backyard…

The hop plants we put in last year decided to come out of hibernation! The best looking one right now is the Chinook plant, but all 3 have shoots poking out of the ground. I’ll keep posting updates as they grow over our heads over the course of summer- next should be getting a trellis of some sort up to start to train the vines, but that’s probably still a couple of weeks out.