2nd Year Hop Growth

[bosox]

I've got a very healthy Cascade growing. It peaked at about 15 feet it's first year and produced about 25 cones.

This year it's already nearing 2 feet tall. However there are about 20 shoots coming up from the ground this year, as opposed to 2 from last year. They're getting kind of tangled up with each other as in they're trying to climb the same string/pole.

Is this a problem? Should I put 1 individual thing for each shoot to climb, or can they sort of all wrap around each other?

 

[Fathand]

They will wrap around each other like crazy if you let them.

I read somewhere that you should only allow X numbers of vines grow per X years old the hops are. And that 4 vines are the max number of vines you ever want growing as the plant matures.

I limited my 2nd year plants to 2 vines each last year and even then the plants grew like crazy and rogue vines wrapped around the main plant.

 

[bosox]

I'll have to monitor which shoots seem to be the strongest and fastest growing and keep trimming the weaker smaller ones back then.

 

[ChadS99SVT]

I'll have to monitor which shoots seem to be the strongest and fastest growing and keep trimming the weaker smaller ones back then.

how exactly are you supposed to trim them back? is there a right or wrong way to do this?

 

[bosox]

To be honest I'm not 100% sure myself haha.....

 

[B-Hoppy]

how exactly are you supposed to trim them back? is there a right or wrong way to do this?

I was told to try to remove them as close back to the crown as possible. The reason I have found this helpful is that if you leave any length of 'nub', more buds will form on that little portion and begin to sprout next year. If this continuous cycle of "little-nub-more-shoots" is allowed to happen year after year, you end up with a very tight crown with a bunch of tiny shoots all trying to squeeze out of the soil to see the sun. After a few years of this the crown begins to become very woody and it makes it very hard to thin them in the spring.

I usually just let them grow about 6-10 inches so you can get a good hold of them, grab at the base and gently pull with steady force to try to dislodge the shoot off of the crown. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

 

[Randar]

Also, the commercial grower(s) that visit this site on occasion also mention that you should not train early-emerging shoots as they will not produce cones as well as later emerging shoots. I don't know why this is, really, but it seems to be ubiquitous among growers as a best practice.

 

[bosox]

Hmmm well I may have to do some trimming. I've got about 20 shoots right now all growing about 1 foot each, some more some less. I guess I should cute all but the 4 strongest of them then

 

[brewmonk]

yeha, you want to end up with only a few shoots per root ball.

Hey, if you were growing a foot a day, you would need an ass-load of water too, to keep up!

you can cook young shoots like asparagus (never tried it). I'd prefer trying to get them to root with Root-tone and a box of perlite!

Yours are doing better than mine, congratulations. Good luck.

-S.

 

[bosox]

Hmm what's root-tone and perlite? Haha I'm really not much of a gardner.

Yeah, the Cascade was a very healthy hop. It did great in it's first year, produced cones on 2 shoots, so I'm not really surprised it's doing great now.