Something I've never seen (Male Hop Parts)

My mature cascade has some strange looking growth in amongst the flowers. I've never seen anything like this in the five years I've had the plant. It looks similar to what I've seen out of male plants. But it could also be undeveloped sidearm/flowers as this plant was highly stressed in early June. All of the bines lost their growth tips along with major leaf damage due from wind. It was strong enough to remove shingles from my home and un-attached garage. There are so many bracts forming I can't count them, but these were sprouting in between. What does anyone think? I can't explain it.

could spontaneous gender self reassignment be a possibility for you?

I really, really, hope you're wrong.

Someone is about to post up about their ripped up plant that couldn't build enough sidearms and just put out these pod looking things.

I've already removed all of these that I could find, as nothing good could become of them. They won't develop into bracts if that's where they're going, and if not I don't need the plant to self pollonate.

These grew at a rate of about 1:30 of my female flowers

Guess what!

It's a boy AND a girl!

Seriously, those little "bunches of grapes" are the male flowering structure and if allowed to come to full bloom they will pollenate EVERYTHING within reach. Hops use both wind and bugs to pollenate. I read that commercial yards will place 1 male plant within 1000 females for hybridization. The worst that can happen is that your hops will have seeds. There are mixed opinions about a seeds effect on beer brewing but no scientific testing has proven any effect.

You can continue to pluck the flower groups off, but they will come back in short time. I have stripped mine 3 times this season alone.

How do I know all this?

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=69795

At least yours is both. My Chinook is all boy.

And yes, according to Dave at Freshops it is possible for hops to have a "spontaneous gender re-assignment" as a result of stress.Sometimes, but rare he says, it can just happen. Best you can do at this point is hope that it doesn't want to be a boy next year. Maybe it's just a puberty induced experimental phase.

Yah, your thread is the one where I saw the pictures. I've removed all of the male parts, there were only about a dozen or so. I don't think that they will be back, as the vegetative growth has pretty much ceased and the plant is just developing it's flowers. Hopefully this doesn't return next year. As for pollination I'm not worried because this plant is far away from my baby plants, and they're not even frowering due to the same damage as this plant.

I wouldn't worry about pollenation either if all of the clusters were plucked in the stage pictured.

When allowed to develope, the cluster actually open up to form some very petite, 5 petal with ~3 stamen flowers. There are actually quite simple and, dare I say, seductive in their simplicity. But I'll be damned if I let that boy goose any of my girls.

I went back out this morning to double check and I took the camera. The lighting is not the best, but you can see them growing on the same stems as the female bracts. Weird for sure. The lighting is not the best in three of them (still learning this camera), but if you look closely you can see the little clusters of them.

Cool pictures! Sorry about your confused plant, I hope you get them all off this year and it goes back to normal for next year.

If anyone has plants like these please post your pic...Good for all of us to learn about these mixed gender plants..And oh, forgot to mention my Zues is large rihzome from freshops and has tons of 1" cones, on it's first year here..Guess what I have found... about a dozen of these tiny dingle berries near the top of the bines and about 1/2 down but not as much...quickly trimmed them off...too bad we don't have an actual hop farmer here who does this on an every day basis..would be nice to get some advice about these...


cuinrearview..If you don't mind.. let us know if they grow back after being clipped..

bighops

heres some of the "boys" I found with my girls....

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...cascade by the way.

Pretty crazy everyone. I thought you guys were joking when you said it could just spontaneously decide to go male! I'll have to keep an eye on mine as well.

This plant is a Cascade. I moved it last year and the male came up in the same hole this year.....from trauma I guess.