Moving hops to/from containers

I have a sudden hop emergency! SWMBO has recently decided that we must replace the siding on our house and garage, which is fine except my hops are planted along my garage wall and are climbing strings attached to hooks at the top of the wall. There are three hills with two rhizomes in each. The Cascades have done pretty well and have three good bines, two about 8' high. The Golding are small (2' and seem to have stopped) and the Willamette are even smaller.

When the siding guy visited he told me the area the hops are planted will get trampled by his team of guys, so they need to be moved or suffer the consequences . I have nowhere else to plant them, so I figure I should move them to containers while the job is done, then replant them. Is this likely to work, or will it do them a lot of harm to mvoe them in the middle of the growing season? The job is scheduled to start in about 4 weeks, so what is my best strategy - (a) move them now while they are smaller, but meaning they will be in the containers for nearly two months, or (b) let them grow and get stronger where they are, and move them at the last minute so they will only be in the containers for maybe 3 weeks? Help!

Move them sooner. The more root structure they grow, the more you'll be hacking off. Certainly the larger the root ball you can manage to remove the better, but you'll be stunting their growth no matter what.

I've listened to several podcasts on hops growing as this is my first year doing so. I would definitely get them moved asap. The guy from BYO has had good success growing hops exclusively in containers so its not the end of the world, that's how I'm growing this year btw. He recommends a container about 20" across and about that deep. If I were you I would wait until the fall/winter to move them back to the ground, I think they would take a serious hit being moved twice during the growing season.

The 2 most important things about container growing is good soil, specifically potting soil not dirt from the yard, and watering. With containers there is less space for water or nutrients so you'll need to water and fertilizer more frequently in containers than you would in the ground. Here's the podcast, it was really helpful.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr02-05-09container.mp3 In the past few days my hops have grown about an inch a day

Thanks guys. Seems I'll be busy this weekend!

This thread takes me back to last June when a bad wind storm removed shingles from my house and garage. We fixed the house ASAP but I held off on the garage until September so as not to upset the hop harvest. Wife wasn't happy but she wasn't the one roofing and I convinced her that the shingles would get damaged if I tried to do it when it was too hot