Watering solution

I've never been a great one for remembering to water plants. Better to not have to. A really good way to do this is with an automatic watering system. In my case I'm using a drip line system that will provide water directly to the plants:

The watering is controlled by a timer on the hose:

Set to water the plants for 15 minutes everyday at 6am. With any luck, this will be the last time I have to worry about watering them.

Cascade trimming

Growth rates are definitely picking up. The Cascade has now got to being a little unruly and in need of some bine selection:

Time to cut back the bines that I'm not going to train up the helix:

Hopefully the Cascade will now concentrate it's growing efforts on these remaining bines. 

Waving, not drowning

Another attempt at capturing hop growth (of the Columbus in this case) through timelapse. This video is made up of images taken every minute for the better part of a day:

There are two bines on the left of the video that start a dance around each other in an attempt to grow upwards. If you look very closely, there is a bine growing up the bamboo pole on the far right showing exactly how hops like to grow up things. It even appears to react to direct sunlight (they unfortunately do not get direct sunlight all day).

How the time flies

It's often said that hops grow so quickly you can almost watch them. For a while now I've been trying to get some time lapse footage of exactly this just to make it clear just how fast they are:

This particular example doesn't really show them growing in length but it does clearly show how they swing around looking for something to wind themselves around so they can grow upwards. If I weren't trying to get them to grow up mine twine in a helix pattern it most likely would have found it. Perhaps this is a sign that my helix is too squashed and I should try to make it more vertical next time. Might help with the training of the bines.

They grow up so quickly

Just a couple of weeks after appearing from their slumber it's time to start training the bines up their helical path via some new twine wrapped around bamboo poles, much like last year:

This also means it's time to select which I think are the strongest shoots and trim back the rest. The Columbus is again coming out the stronger of the two that are left (I've pretty much given up on seeing the Willamette again):

After some thinning out:

Thinning will come to the Cascade when it is ready:

The rhizome I transplanted at the bottom of the garden is also showing signs of life:

The hop shoot risotto wasn't attempted this year due to pretty underwhelming results last year. Even the raw shoots when picked directly from the plants don't really taste of anything. Perhaps different strains of hops are used in the parts of the world where hop shoot risotto is prepared.

Coming out of hibernation

Having been dormant since the autumn it's time to reawaken as the hops start to poke out of the ground again. Last year's harvest was a little disappointing compared to the year before. My current working theory is that the intervening winter was particularly harsh. This last winter didn't seem as bad although we did get some snow:

However, I took some precautions this time just to be on the safe side. This consisted mainly of raking leaves over the raised bed the hops are in to act as insulation and possibly keep some of the weeds down too:

 

Once all the snow had melted and the weather began to warm up I periodically checked under the leaves to see if there were any signs of life. About three weeks ago I found these Columbus shoots:

Time for this year's addition of compost, a lot of which consists of spent grain from brewing for the past year (I love the whole circle of life thing):

The Columbus very quickly found a way through the compost and is looking promising for another year of strong growth:

The Cascade has also made an appearance:

I don't have any expectations about seeing the Willamette this year. It seems that it has been very effectively pushed out of the raised bed by the Columbus and Cascade. The invasive nature of hops has given me the idea to use them for a bio-remediation experiment this year. The bottom of our garden has been overrun by wisteria and ivy from our neighbours' yards for years. We've done our best to pull it up but also being invasive, it just keeps coming back. Now that my hops have been in the ground for a couple of years they should be sturdy enough for me to take a some rhizome and plant it at the bottom of the garden in an attempt to out compete the invaders. A two inch section from the Columbus was transplanted with some of the compost. A couple of weeks later and they've made an appearance:

With any luck they will spread and prevent other things from taking up that space and I might even end up with more hops. Win-win in my book. I'll be keeping an eye on them but won't be cultivating them in the same way I do with those in the raised bed. I really do want them to run wild.

Skip forward to harvest time

This summer has been a very busy one. Various other responsibilities (including a new job) have left me with very little time to keep up with this blog. Fortunately, my hops can look after themselves to a great extent, especially with an automatic drip watering system in place. I was able to take a picture for the weekly overview and I've put the progression down the right hand side of the web-version. You can see from these that both plants do very little growing over August and September. Can't really blame them though, it's been very hot here (even the grass has stopped growing).

The whole reason for growing hops is to have cones that can be harvested and put in beer. The first cones appeared at the end of May:

This is in a very early stage of development. My understanding is this is the stage at which they may be pollinated if there are male plants in the vicinity. As with last year, the Columbus produced both male:

And female cones (you can see some male flowers in this pic too):

I have yet to see any indication that there has been any successful pollination happening, either with itself or the Cascade which is right beside it. Some of this is presumably due to the timing, the male flowers always appear after the female flowers (on both plants) are no longer in the receptive "burr" stage.

The final result of all this growth and cone formation was this:

 

12oz of Columbus and 1oz of Cascade were vacuum sealed and thrown in the freezer. Shame that the Cascade proved to not be very productive this year. Perhaps this will improve once it has established itself more. Alternatively, the Columbus may just push out all of the competition. The Willamette has been almost absent this year. Here's what it looks like at the start of September (you might just be able to see it growing up along the string of lights to the right):

One of the nice things about having a nano operation like this is that I can get more than one harvest per year. While I was picking these first cones I saw this on the Columbus:

Which led to this second harvest (close to another 5oz of Columbus):

Looking forward to putting these into some beer later in the year.

Bugs have caused as much of a problem as they did last year, which is to say not enough to make a noticeable difference to the growth of the plants. Here's a typical example of the worst kind of leaf damage I've seen:

Anybody following from my days in Houston might remember I had previously found a tobacco hornworm on our tomato plants next to my hops. Same thing happened this year too, only with a worse outcome for the hornworms:

This rather gruesome end comes thanks to a parasitic (Braconid) wasp that lays its eggs inside the worm. When the eggs hatch they eat the hornworm from the inside. When the time comes they chew their way through the skin and form a pupa on the outside (those small white things hanging from the worm). Not entirely sure how they convince the hornworm to grip the underside of the plant like that but then I'm also not entirely sorry for them either.

Now we are into September there are signs that Autumn may be on its way. The Cascade, which has always been less productive in comparison to the Columbus, already has some bines that have died off:

The Columbus also has some signs of the oncoming autumnal purge, even if not quite as dramatic as the Cascade:

All told the summer appears to have been much less productive compared to last year. The Columbus gave me a ~1lb this year compared to nearly 2lbs last year, the Cascade a handful of cones vs nearly 2oz last year, and the Willamette barely even appeared and didn't produce any cones at all. I'm wondering if this is due to neglect on my part or perhaps the extreme heat of this summer. I don't remember the grass stopping growing altogether last year. All of this after the extreme cold of last winter. I had to entirely cut back a pair of well established fig trees that didn't make it through the cold. Obviously, I'm leaning towards the climate being the problem, especially given that we used an automatic drip system this year which should have taken a lot of the neglect out of the equation. Hopefully the coming winter will be milder and the following summer kinder. Regardless, I will still be using what I've gathered for a fresh hopped beer of some description in the coming months.