No way my HOA would go for growing hops lol
day_tripper nice haul. How many plants of each variety?
I wish i was at your house smelling that aroma... How can you sleep at night with that smell, it would make me want to brew :rockin:
day_trippr said:So my Chinooks did really well, this their second season, producing a prodigious amount of cones, with a lot of those being jumbo-sized.
But over this latest hot spell it became obvious I was losing the war against a plague of two-spotted spider mites, so I decided to pull the trigger and pick the Chinook - which were pretty much ready anyway.
Yesterday morning I blasted the hop bines with the hose from top to bottom to hopefully knock most of the mites off the plant. I gave it over-night to dry, then early this afternoon started picking. It took the better part of the afternoon to strip all the cones off, but I finally got it done.
That's 14.5 gallons of cones, which came to a bit over 190 ounces wet weight (13 ounces per gallon). At 20% moisture level that should yield around 38 ounces of Chinook hops. Not too shabby
Chinook produces some pretty good sized "angels".
Cheers!
Geez Day_trippr that is a site to behold. You must have great soil.
you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a...
I actually had to carve my hop beds into some totally crappy "soil" along the edge of the decks. We did have a lot of fill put in that area to level out the property a long time back, and I guess what I was digging through is that fill. Good stuff to build on, lousy stuff to grow in.
So after digging out three 8'x3' holes almost two feet deep, I filled it back in with a mix of clean loam, horse poop, compost, and a little sand, and crowned the beds about 6" above grade.
The result has been pretty good. I had an amazing harvest for first year plants. In the fall after I cut down the bines I dug down along the sides of the beds and stuffed in more horse poop and compost.
Then this year I gave the plants a whole lot of neglect, save for erecting the infrastructure and doing a bit of culling and training of the bines. Watering is automatic drip, and I didn't give them any fertilizer until mid June - and that feeding was only because the plethora of burrs freaked me out and I thought the plants would need help turning those all into cones!
So, yeah, the hops are living large with their roots in a pretty nice neighborhood. Just like our veggie and flower gardens, soil is definitely key to good results. Fortunately, we have a huge compost pile, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a horse around here, so the ingredients are easily obtained...
Cheers!
odinsgift said:Don't leave your twine out.
Someone moved it/drove over it, and now there is no end to the tangles.
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