Planting the Hops

Now that my rhizomes have arrived, I thought it would be best to plant them immediately. Normally, if conditions aren't right for planting (potential for frost, poor weather, etc...) you will want to keep them moistened in a zip-lock bag and placed in a refrigerator.

The nice thing is that my rhizomes were shipped with planting instructions, which proved to be quite useful. The hardest part for me was figuring out which way to plant the rhizomes. The instructions say to plant horizontally with the buds facing upwards, however I was unable to determine which end was which. After a quick check online, I found that if you cannot determine which end is up, you can plant it horizontally in the soil. That's the route I decided to take, I figured my success rate would be better that way.

The Garden



This is the area I have set up for growing the hops. It's a north facing wall that gets plenty of sun and has lots of room for growth. More likely than not, I'll probably only get 6' of growth this year, but there is plenty of wall for it to climb if needed. In this picture, you can see that I have two different types of trellis set up, but I am switching over the white trellis with another green trellis like the others. They ran out at Home Depot, so I need to go back and get another one.

While it might look like this box is small, it's actually quite large - it's 12' wide, 2' wide and 2' deep. The box is open on the bottom to promote further root growth. I am using a combination of gardening soil, cow manure and peat moss. I've had great success growing other crops in this box in the past, so I'm sure the hops will thrive once established.

The Hops

I only ended up with 4 rhizomes - the Cascade rhizomes I had ordered ended up selling out, so I'm going to look elsewhere to get these. I hear there is a local nursery that carries hops, so I'm going to see what they offer. I ended up with two varieties - Magnum and Kent Golding.





Once they were planted, I made sure to water. Once I see some growth, I plan on mulching the bed to keep weeds down. From what I've read, these suckers can grow as much as a foot a day - so I'll update the blog every once in awhile with new pictures of growth.

So - what do I do in the meantime? Well... I start learning how to brew, which is why I'm going to research materials I need for brewing at home, and make a trial batch of beer before I attempt to brew my own hops.