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PariahVineyard

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We are currently working on an expansion to the hops we planted last year. The previous thread is here. I figured I'd make a new thread since the last thread was more about starting out. Now we are expanding and working on more issues that come about with being larger than 150 bines.

Recently we are working on cutting our poles to 18 feet. We wanted to make something that could be used year after year for expansions and putting the twine on the wire for the hops to grow up.

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We basically just built a tree stand that we could attach to the back of our truck.

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We also planted 140 potted hop plants that we planted in pots last year as rhizomes and let them grow most of the season. We spread out weed blocker and planted them through it to help us manage them easier. We will be putting drip irrigation overtop once the top lines are in (still waiting on PPL to move some power lines). We've done it to the hops we put in last year. Here is a picture from a few weeks ago. The twine attaches right to the high tensile wire that holds the irrigation tubing.

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We actually have 10 of the potted mt hoods in the first two pictures left over if anyone is interested. Send me a PM if you are.

We also planted about 250 rhizomes this year putting us around 550 bines total. I know it's not a lot, but it makes additional issues that were easily solved when we only had 150 hops.
 
Do it, it works great. Just make sure to bolt the stand to the truck and use a few ratchet straps you don't have to worry about it every falling over. Only cost about $150 to make as well.

The high tensile wire is cheap too and keeps the irrigation out of dirt which will keep bugs and dirt out of the drippers. Keeping the water low on the plant and concentrated helps fight fungus.
 
We spent the last weekend cleaning up the 2 year old hops. Weeding and mulching with straw.
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We also wired up the new hop yard with our "tree stand" setup on the truck.
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You can see the 2 year old hop yard on the top left side and the hop yard we just wired in the rest of the picture.
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Next is running the irrigation and twine.
 
Well our Nugget and Columbus will be harvested for fresh hops on Sunday August 11th. The Cascade are taking longer to develop and will probably be ready in 3 week or so.

here are some recent pictures of our field-

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PariahVineyard said:
Well our Nugget and Columbus will be harvested for fresh hops on Sunday August 11th. The Cascade are taking longer to develop and will probably be ready in 3 week or so.

here are some recent pictures of our field-

Looking great man. A little better than us down here unfortunately.
 
Those are the second year. The first year hops are doing okay, but nothing like this. It's to be expected though.
 
We just harvested the remaining on Tuesday. I made a tea with some of the cascade and they were awesome.

How did yours go?
 
Greetings!

Wow great stuff! We started our yard just this year...only 30 rhizomes (Cascade and Nugget) and we'll be able to harvest 5lbs which for a first year I'm pretty happy with.

We are looking to expand quite a bit next year and even though we don't currently use a v trellis system like you have, I'm considering it...however in ours the bottom of the V is at the soil and runs up to 2 different cross cables at the top. Your's is like an "inverted" V.

Have you been pretty happy with that setup? Just curious how difficult it is to weed and harvest with that setup?

We are DEFINITELY going to construct a platform like you did. We rented a local painters high bucket truck...not too bad for 3 hours at $50 per hour, however it'd be nice to have our own resource and honestly I think it's easier to navigate something like that vs the high bucket.

Thanks!

HopYard_1.jpg
 
Hey HoffAppFarm, welcome to the forum.

This is my thread but I had to switch user names.

We actually only did the A trellis for our first install. It's what we had available and works quite well, besides getting to the weeds inside of the A section. Everything else we've put in is like your picture above. Single wire run over 18' high poles (logs). Those are much easier to maintain. Most yards are setup like you are describing above. Using a V up to the wires above. That way maximizes air flow and sunlight to the bines. You can also have more bines that way too.

Since the last post I put on this thread we've installed 7 more rows and planted over 600 more hills. Just used a bucket truck to push the poles into the holes and used our stand on the back of the truck to do all the cable work. Worked pretty well.

Keep an eye out for one of those lifts you see that are on their own set of wheels. I once saw one go for 2k at an auction, which was like 4 months before I planned our larger hop yard. It would have really come in handy and the price is worth it when you can drive the thing yourself without having a 2 person crew (one driving the truck, other up in the stand). It's also hard to get the truck tight enough to the poles to work on them sometimes since we have irrigation running below. But, for the $100-200 that it spent to build it, it is worth it to have around.
 
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