Having installed the automatic watering system the weather promptly decides that it's time for some rain. Fortunately, this particular system has an easy rain delay feature. This all means that growth of the bines is continuing apace (see hop height graph). The first of the burrs (early stage flowers) are appearing (hoping for an increased yield on last year):
One aspect of training hop bines I have previously read about but not done much about is whether to prune bull shoots or not. It seems that commercial growers prefer to prune these as they can be more easily broken due to being hollow. Up to now I have let them grow as our back garden is pretty sheltered from high winds. Today I found a bull shoot that almost looks as if it pulled itself apart:
In this case I have cut it back to just above the nearest node. I will keep a close eye on the bull shoots that are left to see if more breakages happen and whether they are less productive than the non-bull shoots. Hopefully next year I will have a better idea of how to proceed with pruning.
Bottom of the garden hops are also progressing nicely:
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