[AgingHopster]

Below: A screw-up brew that I will brew again. I missed my OG and has to add 2 lb.s of DME but all I had was amber so I went with it and wow!!! This is now an Amber Cream Ale and everyone including myself is in love with it!

[Rivenin]

amazing!

[ForerunnerBrewer]

Originally Posted by AgingHopster

"Don't it always seem to go that they don't know what they've got till it's gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" - Joni Mitchell

OOOOh lalala! Not the exclamation, the back up singers!

I just wanted to say from experience that the composted cow manure & humus you have in the picture is amazing stuff! My hops literally bursted with new growth every time I side dressed with it last season. However, I highly recommend mixing it thoroughly, maybe 50/50, with a compost, vermiculite or anything that will break it up and keep the soil loose. It turns into clay when it dries and doesn't drain very well.

With my Fuggles from GLH this year I spotted a single root that went into one of these nutrient rich clay nuggets and came out the other side multiplied into several roots!

Cheers!

[AgingHopster]

Originally Posted by ForerunnerBrewer

OOOOh lalala! Not the exclamation, the back up singers!

I just wanted to say from experience that the composted cow manure & humus you have in the picture is amazing stuff! My hops literally bursted with new growth every time I side dressed with it last season. However, I highly recommend mixing it thoroughly, maybe 50/50, with a compost, vermiculite or anything that will break it up and keep the soil loose. It turns into clay when it dries and doesn't drain very well.

With my Fuggles from GLH this year I spotted a single root that went into one of these nutrient rich clay nuggets and came out the other side multiplied into several roots!

Cheers!

That's good advise! The cheap Home Depot bagged products are usually mostly clay. I learned the hard way one year when I bought the same brand of what they labeled as "top soil" and the stuff was like river mud. Good stuff but I had to amend it with so much that it really wasn't worth the "savings". This humic and composted manure is, very simalr but a much better base to make your own mix with than the top soil.

My typical mix is usually something like 30% of bagged compost-humic 20% rice hulls or perlite and 50% sphagnum peat. I usually mix in lots of other stuff too like greensand, various guanos and dolomite lime, blood meal and bone meal and I am very generous with the worm castings. I find you just can't use too much worm castings.

More pics:


More than overbuilt I suppose but those were the only pulleys I could find locally that would work with the plastic coated cable. They're rated for 800 lb each! BTW, It snowed yesterday, 2 weeks ago it was 84F! Gotta love MI weather.

[AgingHopster]

More Pics

[Rivenin]

this would be a great idea for portland too... hrm... got me thinking!

[AgingHopster]

A variation of O'Daniel's Foreign Extra Stout. Very, very nice. My new favorite stout.

My son working on the brewery/nursery.

Ian raking in some rice hulls.

[Reno_eNVy]

This is amazing!

[JPKDetroit]

Hopster- Followed your advice and put an order in through Great Lakes Hops last month. I checked on my order only to learn that I ordered some crowns and some starters. Since pretty much everyone else seems to only sell rhizomes I'm a little confused about what the difference between a hop and starter is. Thought you might know?

Also, since you're in Detroit you might want to check out Detroit Farm and Garden for soil and compost in the future. They just opened and are probably a better local option than Home Depot, especially since you weren't hoppy with the quality of the Home Depot soil.

[AgingHopster]

Originally Posted by JPKDetroit

Hopster- Followed your advice and put an order in through Great Lakes Hops last month. I checked on my order only to learn that I ordered some crowns and some starters. Since pretty much everyone else seems to only sell rhizomes I'm a little confused about what the difference between a hop and starter is. Thought you might know?

Also, since you're in Detroit you might want to check out Detroit Farm and Garden for soil and compost in the future. They just opened and are probably a better local option than Home Depot, especially since you weren't hoppy with the quality of the Home Depot soil.

Hi!

A rhizome is just a small piece of the root of an older plant that is now sprouting this years new growth. The rhizome is buried and a new plant grows, along with any parasitic fungi or other microbial life that was dormant in the roots from last year.

A crown is like a baby plant with both roots and above ground growth, usually cut from the above ground portion of it's healthy mother plant. Because you got yours from GLH, you can rest assured that your plants did not arrive with fungi and parasites, which you can never tell when buying rhizomes.