Hop Trellis build

I thought some of you might want to see how we went about building our hop trellis even though we got a late start on it. My friend's parents have a big farm in southeastern Ohio and they grow all kinds of plants and vegetables, so agreed to tend to the hops. We used some very straight 21' black locust trees that had fallen recently in the surrounding woods on the property. It turns out black locust is very rot resistant and frequently used as fence posts. The posts are sent in 3' deep holes; no concrete was used since it is mostly clay where the soil hadn't been ammended for planting. We strung heavy duty string between pots and left enough slack that the hole "clothes line" can be lowered to the ground for harvesting. The cross rope will be reused year after year, but the vertical climbing support ropes won't be. They are made from sisal and can be composted with the bines. The whole thing is braced by two guy wires on each end. We manage to erect the whole thing in about 4 hrs. The next morning we planted 2 plants each of cascade, chinook, Mt. Hood and nugget.

In the first pic you can see the trellis way in the background.


My friend in the pic is about 6'0 tall.

Looks GREAT!!! Well done!

Thanks, I think it should work out nicely.

Don't let those dogs eat your hops. I hear hops are deadly for dogs.

So the dog is ~2ft tall?

Oakley said:

So the dog is ~2ft tall?

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Yeah, this is more of a concern at harvest time:
http://www.homebrewjunkie.com/2008/08/how-to-harvest-home-grown-hops-video.html (see minute 6)

Oakley said:

So the dog is ~2ft tall?

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Yup.

benmoore said:

Don't let those dogs eat your hops. I hear hops are deadly for dogs.

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The chocolate lab came home with us and the other one is a farm dog; so he'll be fine.

I'm building something very similar to this if it ever stops raining here in PA. I was planning a 6' x 6' spacing between hills, which looks to be about what you did.

Is there any particular reason you went with 1 string per hill instead of 2? I was thinking about running 2 strings per hill, spaced 2' apart at the top. This would leave 4' spacing between strings of different varieties. I just don't know if it would get too crowded up top, or if the difference in yield would be worth putting up the 2nd string.

Atvar said:

I'm building something very similar to this if it ever stops raining here in PA. I was planning a 6' x 6' spacing between hills, which looks to be about what you did.

Is there any particular reason you went with 1 string per hill instead of 2? I was thinking about running 2 strings per hill, spaced 2' apart at the top. This would leave 4' spacing between strings of different varieties. I just don't know if it would get too crowded up top, or if the difference in yield would be worth putting up the 2nd string.

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We had eight rhizomes (4 varieties) so the determined how many we placed at each hill. We knew that the rhizomes will produce more bines but we were concerned that as the strings approached the apex they would become too close together, only about 2' apart. Our spacing is about 5' apart both at top and bottom.

do you have any pictures from the results of this setup?