Hop Growing in Las Vegas

[NoisufnoC]

how often should the irrigation run? can you suggest an drip emitter size?

 

[david_42]

1 gph is a good size. Water daily the first year. Start at 30 minutes and then 1 hour once the bines are 4-5 ft tall. If they hit 10' do two hours every other day, you want to encourage deep rooting.

 

[NoisufnoC]

1 gph is a good size. Water daily the first year. Start at 30 minutes and then 1 hour once the bines are 4-5 ft tall. If they hit 10' do two hours every other day, you want to encourage deep rooting.

sounds good. i'm going to put them right in the ground this year, instead of trying to use the pots.

 

[Firebelly]

Anyone have success with hops in Vegas yet?? I feel like it might be too late to plant this year, but looking for input. Just stumbled onto a good deal on some rhizomes while in LA. Really tempting to grab some. Vegas has really awful weather for anything but cacti though.

 

[in_a_days]

Another Las Vegan here, taking a stab at growing hops.

I live in a condo/townhouse so no yard. I have two rhizomes planted in containers on my east-facing balcony. The shade hits at just about noon, so (provided I can sustain something) the plants will be shaded during the hottest part of the day. I plan to run the vines mostly horizontally on a couple lattices around the edge of the balcony.

One of the containers is a 1/2 whiskey barrel. I think it's like 20 gallons. The other container is definitely too small, probably closer to 5 gallons. But I already had it and didn't want to buy a ton of stuff not knowing if I can even do this successfully. If they live through the summer I will get another barrel and transplant. I planted two Cascade rhizomes this past Friday (purchased from freshops.com), and both containers sprouted today.

I set up a very-DIY drip irrigation system. I took a couple water bottles and jugs of various sizes and poked a bunch of holes at different levels, and buried them in the containers to different depths. The clear bottles actually give a pretty good glimpse of the moisture content of the substrate.

I have been watering like crazy. Two or three times a day and we haven't even cracked 100 yet. When the sprouts get to a trainable height I'm going to add two or three inches of mulch to help with moisture retention.

I will try to update, and if I can keep anything alive or get anything growing I'll post some pics.

 

[in_a_days]

I dialed back watering over the last couple days. Much closer to once a day. The sprouts all look great, going to Lowe's tonight to pick up some kind of lattice and some mulch. Things are pretty easy right now, I'm a little nervous to see what happens when we get up around 110-115. At least they'll be in the shade by the point in the day when those temperatures actually hit.