Sanity check on pole based hop yard design with boxes

[iandanielursino]

My plan is to bury 5 inch by 20 foot poles so that they protrude 15 feet, possibly with cement, and string a 26 foot or so line between them out to the north of my little orchard (my house is on 2.5 acres in Western Washington) so it doesn't shade them. The hops will be planted 3 feet apart on center in 1.5 foot square boxes of 2 x 12 which are mostly buried to prevent the rhyzomes from spreading about easily.

That makes 8 boxes, I'm planning to plant Tettnang, Hallertau, Spalt Select, Northern Brewer, Cascade, Centennial, Comet, and Tahoma. My understanding is that a rhyzome typically only goes down 6 inches, but that to maintain them I must cut away excess rhyzome each year so that they don't spread out too much.

Also obviously I'll need to get a nice ladder to go up 15 feet.

Does that make sense?

Anyone that knows poles want to comment on whether I need ground anchors to tension it? Or someone that knows hops on whether 1.5 foot boxes is too small or 2 x 12 boxes too shallow?

I got the idea of 3 foot on center boxes from this gentleman as I understand that without something there the rhyzomes would get all mixed up and I might not know which variety is which, and for that reason commercial growers use a larger row spacing between varieties:

 

[day_trippr]

Having grown 16 hop plants hanging from a single line I recommend incorporating end stays to prevent sagging and to help handle winds when the bines are full grown "sails".

Also, if you put up a 15' tall line, healthy bines will grow over that and hang down. Nbd, happens to the pros, too, but it adds more mass and "sail" area...

Cheers!

 

[iandanielursino]

Having grown 16 hop plants hanging from a single line I recommend incorporating end stays to prevent sagging and to help handle winds when the bines are full grown "sails".

Also, if you put up a 15' tall line, healthy bines will grow over that and hang down. Nbd, happens to the pros, too, but it adds more mass and "sail" area...

Cheers!

I'm not sure what you mean by an end stay, you mean a line to stabilize the pole, or something to do with the way the main cable is rigged?

 

[day_trippr]

Tie a stout line to the top of each pole then pull them outwards directly in line with your top wire and anchor them to keep the poles from bending inwards...

Cheers!

 

[iandanielursino]

Thanks, then I guess I'll use a steel cable on each side with turnbuckles to adjust the tension.

Sounds like 1.5 foot boxes are fine. I heard for growing in containers you want 20" diameter. 18" square is actually a slightly larger area so that should be good, plus plenty of room for roots since its open bottom. I could also do 24" though and just reduce the space in between so it's still 3' on center.

 

[day_trippr]

The more room you can give the hops the higher the production and the easier to maintain, as the greater the spacing the greater the sun exposure and the less the intertwining...

Cheers!

 

[Climb]

I am not clear on your post size; you wrote "5 inch by 20 foot". Is that 5" x 5" x 20' or 5" diameter x 20'. What are your posts made out of? Use metal if you can. Buried 5' in the ground seems over kill. I think 3' in the ground would be enough and this will give you an additional 2' of height. I strongly recommend that you have a top line that you can lower for harvesting or spraying insecticide if needed. This prevents the need for a ladder. I noticed that the guy in the video you linked to has done this.

 

[iandanielursino]

My orchard is actually 32ft I measured the other day, so I might consider 3.5ft on center instead of 3. I don't know if I could do 4-5 and still have 8 plants with 2 bines each. I expect my production is going to be way more than I need regardless

 

[iandanielursino]

I am not clear on your post size; you wrote "5 inch by 20 foot". Is that 5" x 5" x 20' or 5" diameter x 20'. What are your posts made out of? Use metal if you can. Buried 5' in the ground seems over kill. I think 3' in the ground would be enough and this will give you an additional 2' of height. I strongly recommend that you have a top line that you can lower for harvesting or spraying insecticide if needed. This prevents the need for a ladder. I noticed that the guy in the video you linked to has done this.

5" diameter. I was hoping to find a solid softwood pole like they use for childrens play structures or an actual hop pole as both are cheap. As there are 8 different varieties taking it down to harvest does not seem appropriate as they would probably be harvested on different days.

I'll look into metal, not sure what kind to use or the cost.

 

[tracer bullet]

Coupe thoughts, I've grown hops a few times but not any more (too much work):

The 1.5 foot square boxes sound a little small for 15' poles. Mine grew 10 - 15' but the roots spread out a lot. I didn't actually try to contain them, so that could work, but if you have a little more room in the ground I think I'd give it to them. You may need to actively provide nutrients to the soil as well.

I'd consider a method to lower the vines so you can harvest from the ground. Or with a shorter ladder. Something that can go up at the beginning of the year and down later.

I liked having a number of cables running vertically, I'd usually choose a half dozen to 10 vines and have them grow, and then keep cutting the rest that came out of the ground. I might not have needed to do it but felt it was a little easier to track them.

Have you grown hops before? Jumping in and growing 8 varieties sounds fun but you might end up overwhelmed. If it's your first time you might start with just a few, and let them go a few years, and then decide if you love it enough to add more.

Plan on gloves and a long sleeve shirt at harvest time, I always ended up with really itchy forearms from all the little scratches. I don't miss that at all.

I don't always do the easy route on things, I prefer brewing over buying beer. But... I prefer buying hops over growing them. They are easy and hard at the same time.

 

[iandanielursino]

Coupe thoughts, I've grown hops a few times but not any more (too much work):

The 1.5 foot square boxes sound a little small for 15' poles. Mine grew 10 - 15' but the roots spread out a lot. I didn't actually try to contain them, so that could work, but if you have a little more room in the ground I think I'd give it to them. You may need to actively provide nutrients to the soil as well.

I'd consider a method to lower the vines so you can harvest from the ground. Or with a shorter ladder. Something that can go up at the beginning of the year and down later.

I liked having a number of cables running vertically, I'd usually choose a half dozen to 10 vines and have them grow, and then keep cutting the rest that came out of the ground. I might not have needed to do it but felt it was a little easier to track them.

Have you grown hops before? Jumping in and growing 8 varieties sounds fun but you might end up overwhelmed. If it's your first time you might start with just a few, and let them go a few years, and then decide if you love it enough to add more.

Plan on gloves and a long sleeve shirt at harvest time, I always ended up with really itchy forearms from all the little scratches. I don't miss that at all.

I don't always do the easy route on things, I prefer brewing over buying beer. But... I prefer buying hops over growing them. They are easy and hard at the same time.

I think 1.5 is what the guy in the video I linked was using, although now I can't find where he said that. It looks like 1.5, but could also be 2. I've heard 3 feet on center as a minium for standard hop growing, albiet typically of the same variety.

Anyways I don't want that much of each one, so I figure two bines is enough and was planning to use standard hop twine off a standard steel cable.

Never grown hops before, but I do have grapes, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, a 5x5 orchard of semi dwarf trees, and herbs already. Too late to go back since I already pre-ordered 2x8 rhizomes lol. I'm reckless. Anyways I figured if I box them and prune the rhizomes well so they don't spread and grow on something approximating a professional hop trellis I should be able to figure it out.

It seems to me that the distance between boxes is governed mostly by the need to keep rhizomes separate, I think if you trim them every year that probably won't be a big deal. The size of boxes seems to be governed by the need for the rhizomes to expand, my understanding is a 20 inch circle is considered enough and that really the important thing is to trim them so that the plant does not feel cramped. Finally you have the spacing of the twine on the cable which I suppose has to be enough they dont' compeltely tangle, but I"m not sure how important that is. I was thinking to hang the twine in a V pattern for each box with each twine 1.5 feet away from the next twine.

I'm thinking if I want to be safe I might want to do 2 foot square boxes with 4 foot spacing on center with 1 foot margins for a 34 foot span. I can easily fit that in my space.

 

[day_trippr]

Spacing is to maximize sunlight exposure. If they crowd each other and intertwine they're directly competing for energy and they all lose. I planted my crowns on 3 foot centers and probably should have done 4 feet instead.

btw: This top line was 21 feet above grade and the bines reached it by mid-July and started traveling along it. They still had another two months of growing and fruiting to go and the top third was a tangled mess. But both years shown I ended up with over 12 pounds of dried and vacuum bagged cones (Chinook, Cascade and Centennial with some Fuggles thrown in)...

July 2014

July 2015

Cheers!

 

[Dland]

The relatively small size of proposed boxes runs the risk of the rhizomes becoming root bound after a few years. This will cause plant to decline and may lead to root rot. This can be avoided by cutting out some of the roots and rhizomes each year and replacing with new soil, but that is a lot of work, and might set the plants back.

I understand the desire to keep rhizomes separate, I've had to dig trenches between some of mine to keep from co mingling, they were planted about 4 ft apart, and grew together by fourth year in ground(last year). I'm going to install a root barrier between them before next spring, but roots will still be able to spread in two directions and benefit from natural drainage and aeration , since there is no bottom.

There is a limit to how much the rhizomes will try to grow down. When they hit a barrier, they trend to go up to jump over it, making them easy to prune. A couple of pressure treated 2x10s on edge might be enough, or better yet there are 60 & 80 mil purpose designed root barriers available, just do a search for bamboo root barrier. I've installed this on both new bamboo plantings and to control established ones with success, and bamboo rhizomes are much more aggressive than hops.

 

[iandanielursino]

Well since I've already talked myself into a slightly >34 foot span and 4 on center, I suppose I may as well use a bit more material and go with a single continuous box broken up with internal dividers. Eventually you save wood by not having both left and right walls. Then I could have 4x2 4x3 or 4x4 boxes for each rhizome depending how wide the box is.

Is 1 2x12 on end buried 10 inches below ground going to be too shallow?

Perhaps I could do a box of 2x12s and then add internal dividers made of the plastic crap. What depth do you think you need for hops with those rhizome barrier?

My understanding is eventually you have to trim the rhizomes no matter what though like this guy describes at 11 mins in.

 

[Dland]

From what I've seen, hops rhizomes tend to grow pretty shallow, so one 2x12 might do it, especially if good topsoil layer is only 6-8 inches deep. Rhizomes don't usually try to grow into infertile and or hard subsoil. However, if soil is deep and good, rhizomes might try to go under it. I would make barrier deep enough to block all the good top soil, and a further 2 or 3 inches down into subsoil.

I'm going to add the barriers between the hops, and not bother with the external parts boxing them in. They can always be mowed and root pruned with a sharp shovel, or chain trencher if you have one.

If you want to go with the "plastic crap" the 30 mil stuff 18 inch wide on this link should be fine for hops.

https://www.rhizomebarrier.com/rhizome-bamboo-barrier-100-mil-thickness-HDPE/

 

[iandanielursino]

If I go with one (I guess it can be ~32 foot then because there aren't margins anymore) I guess I can just make the divider walls twice as deep as the external walls, I am not worried about what happens if they escape to the fore or the rear, just the sides.

2 foot boxes sound easier to manage but if 4 foot boxes will make a healthier plant it seems worth doing. Plus double deep divider walls on a megabox would actually be cheaper than 8 little boxes that are twice as deep.

That is, the number of feet of material would be given by.

x = box width
y = box depth
n = number of boxes

for separate boxes: (2x + 2y)n
for combined boxes 2xn + y(n+1)

Combined boxes are less if x and y are the same but 2x2 separate is still less material than 2x4 combined and both are 4 foot on center.

This doc from Rutgers supports 2-3 feet being enough rhizome space since that's what they put as the same-variety spacing, granted they can expand further orthogonal to the rows I suppose.

https://www.canr.msu.edu/uploads/234/71501/fs992 Growing Hops Rutgers University.pdf

Within each row plants are planted in hills spaced 2 to 3 feet apart

It also bears mentioning, the goal is to get a little bit of a lot of varieties, I'm not trying to maximize yield as I think anything I do with 8 plants 2 bines each is gonna be way more hops than I need.

I think I'm trying to decide between 2x2 separate boxes 4 foot on center (64ft) and 4x4 boxes connected to each other (100ft)

 

[day_trippr]

It also bears mentioning, the goal is to get a little bit of a lot of varieties

I barely managed four. "Lateral branching happens"

Cheers!

 

[iandanielursino]

I wonder if you could put some kind of winding mazelike structure around the end of each variety on the wire so the hop gets confused and goes in circles lol. I heard some people say if you cut the tip off then it will not grow out of the end anymore, so does it work to snip them when they are near the top? I'm planning to do 1 bine per twine, two twines per plant like on a farm and keep clipping new bines as they come so if that works it should be fairly manageable.

Also another source re: minimum space for rhizomes to live in; In this thread Nagmay said:

If I was creating an open box for in individual crowns 1.5 - 3' square would work really well.

It also occurs to me to try planting Rhubarb between the hops so they can't escape. But maybe the Rhubarb would attack the hops then lol.

 

[day_trippr]

I heard some people say if you cut the tip off then it will not grow out of the end anymore

Right. But just like most trees it will create two new branches at the previous node

Cheers!

 

[JAReeves]

Right. But just like most trees it will create two new branches at the previous node

Cheers!

 

[day_trippr]

lol! There were times it seemed the hops wanted to take over the premises
This was the typical view from my office from July through harvest time for the 7 years I grew hops...

Cheers!

 

[Dland]

lol! There were times it seemed the hops wanted to take over the premises
This was the typical view from my office from July through harvest time for the 7 years I grew hops...

View attachment 840448

Cheers!

Sounds like you aren't growing hops any more. Did you root them all out because they became to much to deal with?

 

[day_trippr]

After 7 years I finally did the math

When current vintage Chinook, Cascade and Centennial hop pellets could be had back then for $10~12/pound it didn't make economic sense to be expending so much time on home growns. Plus my 2014 Cascade got infested big time with spider mites just a couple weeks before harvest, too close to use anything on them to kill the mites, and I couldn't bring myself to use them.

Had a really good run and it was fun for the most part. I was giving pounds of vac-bagged dried cones away the last few years. But between the time and sudden appreciation of their vulnerability I finally decided to give it up. Kind of miss them but don't miss the bug battles, harvest, and post-season cleanup parts.

Cheers!

 

[iandanielursino]

This is my plan at the moment which I sent to my landscaper for his review.

 

[brewSJ]

Maybe your planning on this and it just isn’t in the drawing, but what I see is making the engineer in me is nervous. I would add two more 70-degree wires on each side, one [per side] into the page and one out of it. On your top view (top of the photo), in addition to all the horizontal stuff already there, these would be drawn vertically.

Without them, any front-back force on the plants — like a good stiff wind — and the whole thing will become a big sail and topple over. You could maybe cut back to just two support lines per side if they were angled, but with everything in a line it will be very susceptible to perpendicular forces.

 

[phbern]

I did something similar to what I think you want to do - just on a smaller scale. As you can see, the wire across the top is sagging and got much worse as the hops grew bigger - they did eventually reach the top. Which presented another problem: getting up there to tend to them. This season I'm going to attach the cords the hops are growing on to a 2x4 and use the wire to raise and lower the 2x4 as necessary. BTW the cross wire is about 18ft high

 

[day_trippr]

fwiw, my top line ran through small pulleys atop each post down to side mounted cleats with enough length to lower the bines to the upper deck. Wouldn't even want to think about stripping bines while they were still hanging high!

Cheers!

 

[JAReeves]

Makes me think a pulley to raise and lower my twine from the eye bolts in the eaves may be a technological leap forward. Leaning over the edge of the roof to tie them up and cut them down isn't the safest.

 

[iandanielursino]

Maybe your planning on this and it just isn’t in the drawing, but what I see is making the engineer in me is nervous. I would add two more 70-degree wires on each side, one [per side] into the page and one out of it. On your top view (top of the photo), in addition to all the horizontal stuff already there, these would be drawn vertically.

Without them, any front-back force on the plants — like a good stiff wind — and the whole thing will become a big sail and topple over. You could maybe cut back to just two support lines per side if they were angled, but with everything in a line it will be very susceptible to perpendicular forces.

My understanding is the guy lines on the end are to counteract the force applied by the cable so a different purpose to what you're describing.

Not sure if a 20' pole buried 5' would fall over in the wind, probably not in spring or summer as we don't get bad winds in that season here, but I guess its cheap insurance to just put six cables in.

 

[iandanielursino]

View attachment 840941

I did something similar to what I think you want to do - just on a smaller scale. As you can see, the wire across the top is sagging and got much worse as the hops grew bigger - they did eventually reach the top. Which presented another problem: getting up there to tend to them. This season I'm going to attach the cords the hops are growing on to a 2x4 and use the wire to raise and lower the 2x4 as necessary. BTW the cross wire is about 18ft high

How big are those boxes?

Makes me think a pulley to raise and lower my twine from the eye bolts in the eaves may be a technological leap forward. Leaning over the edge of the roof to tie them up and cut them down isn't the safest.

I won't rule that out, but I think I'd attach any pully system to the main cable separately for each bine or pair of bines because the different varieties may be ready to pick on different days.

What I was thinking actually is if I made the cable taut enough maybe I can put an extension ladder with hooks against the cable itself.

 

[day_trippr]

I think each end post could be stayed with just two lines coming off at maybe 30° angles to the high line...

Cheers!

 

[Dland]

I took a different approach and strung each vine separately. Bines clime up lines on bamboo poles, which are lashed to locust poles. The bamboo poles can be pivoted down for harvest.