Harvesting rhizomes

[kjosefy]

I have about 10 different varieties of hops growing in 5 gallon buckets what time of year should I harvest the rhizome from the bucket to transplant them into the ground?

 

[Ruint]

Early spring is when you should plant them in the ground. Make sure you keep them either labeled or separated when you do...it's not hard to lose track of which one was what... Mine start growing in march, but they are fairly established. Young plants and rhizomes you need to take care of, because frost can do serious damage to them. If you are out of the frosting period where you live, then you would probably be safe in getting them in the ground. If you don't mind me asking...what are they going to be growing up? Trellis? Flag pole with teepee setup?

 

[kjosefy]

I have a suspended cable with rope running down to eat one

 

[Sadu]

So how does one harvest the rhizome then? I have a 1st year (southern hemisphere, summertime at the moment) cascade plant in the ground. If I could harvest a couple of rhizomes from it and make it 2 or 3 cascade plants for next season that would be swell.

 

[Ruint]

I grew those this year...18" trellis and we use coir to come down from top line.

 

[Ruint]

@Sadu....you will not want to cut rhizomes off of your 1st year plants. They recommend that you don't until they are 3 yrs old. You can possibly grow more plants next year by cloning. Definitely look that up on the intranet. Read as much as you can on it. We did that with some of our plants and had a 50/50 outcome. Our plants are still too young to cut rhizomes from.

 

[B-Hoppy]

Sadu, if you planted rhizomes you'll most likely not have anything to harvest until the end of your second year at the earliest. Here's a pic of what a rhizome looks like after one growing season and you'll see that they've grown a bunch of roots and contain many more buds which will form the climbing shoots that produce the hops. The rhizomes aren't generally formed until the plant has accumulated more energy reserves than what it needs to sustain 'normal' growth. Any excess that's accumulated can be put towards survival mechanisms, rhizomes. If you started with plants, you may be able to make some cuttings at the end of the season once they die back to the ground. Just dig around the crown and check.

Also, one of the easiest methods of propagation is layering and is shown here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=594014

 

[Sadu]

Thanks for the info, cheers.