I'm not afraid to admit it. Since my last post on April 30, they were in charge. My life — and the lives of my wife and in-laws — were entangled like so many hop bines on string. We were desperately behind in the construction of our hopyard (thanks in part to an unusually wet June), but our plants were already in the ground. In four months we've managed to fell more than 90 trees, become Bobcat drivers, earth movers, tree lifters, rhizome planters, mulch layers and cable runners. We've built an 18-foot tall scaffolding on a trailer. We've finished an acre-sized drip irrigation system that can pump 12,000 gallons of water for our thirsty plants. We have a dryer to process it all.
Our vocabulary has changed, too. Oast, cone, lupulin roll of our tongues easy now. Dinner-table discussions about alpha-acids or nitrogen fertilizer happen regularly. And amidst all the work, the hops kept growing.
Fortunately, they aren't winning anymore.
With our first-year harvest looming, the plants are healthy and tall. Our daily list of projects is winding down, just like our short northern summer. Hops take a few years to come to full production, but right now it looks as if we'll have a good starter-crop that will help us work out the kinks in drying and packaging the plants. It's been an amazing summer and we still have so much to look forward to. Enjoy a few pictures of our process and I'll delve into all the various parts of setting up the field on here later.
So we started here with the holes:
Until we were ready to plant our rhizomes:
It was a lot of fun:
But it was also very tiring:
And despite the heavy rain in June, we still needed to water in July and August:
And to put down plastic, as well as our twine:
Our arms took a beating from the scratchy hops:
But we'll take this as a sign it was all worth it:
Because now we have something beautiful to sell . . .
. . . and an excuse to enjoy a good beer.
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