On a whim I ordered some rhizomes; planning to drop them on a hill that has vigorous plant growth without watering. It’s north facing, coastal, with some direct sunlight.
Asking for insight:
what’s a minimum depth for soil? It’s 1 to 4 inches of hard-pack on clay, all needing rework to make loamy. Can I get by with 8 to 12 inches of depth?
are hop vines trainable? I can set them up to go 16’ tall, but I’d rather have them run horizontally after a 3 to 6 foot rise. Would it negatively affect the plant?
8-12 inches of rich welld drained loam will be okay, you will want to top dress every year so that will increase with time as well.
Some direct light is not great. They will take as much light as you can give them and will produce much better with more.
The bines are trainable and much prefer to go vertical. If you train them horizontal you will get less harvest but generally you get a lot anyway so it may be fine.
My Cascade plant goes about 6’ up a deer fence, than horizontal across the top. The plant is maybe 10-11 years old now. My harvest averages about 20 lb. before drying from a single plant.
so you get ~4 lbs per plant dry, looks like the industry standard (whatever that is) is about 2.8 tons per hectare which very roughly works out to about 10 lbs per plant.
Yeah, that’s about average. It’s been as high as 7 lb. from the one plant after drying. Even I can’t use 4-7 lb. of Cascades in a year. And around here, trying to give away Cascade hops is like trying to give away zucchini in August!
I can imagine. I would start brewing a lot more IPA’s if I had that much hops hanging around. My haul last year (first year) was exactly 4 cones from the cascade and 1 from the centennial. 0 from the sterling.
I will top dress my 4 plants ( 2 cascade and 2 centennial ) this year with a mixture of manure and soil. What other fertilizing regiment do you use throughout the growing season? Is a hit of manure in the spring enough nitrogen to feed them until flowering time? Do you switch fertilizers at a particular time of the year?
My cascasdes do well ( not 7 lbs well but ok ) but my centennials get half way up the trellis and stop.
From HopsDirect, they listed two for coastal climates, Cascade and US Tettnanger, grabbed one of each. I use about 4 pounds a year, this would maybe replace half my inventory if I’m lucky.
I’m in an area where if the sun is out and it’s over 70 degrees F, that’s a hot day.
I’m in the east bay. I get a what I consider a good crop of Cascade and of Magnum (about a pound dried), and tiny amounts of my other varieties (hallertau, saaz, columbus, sterling, fuggle, northern brewer).
Drainage and sunshine seem to be the important issue for me. The plants w/the most sun produce the most hops. I’m moving some plants this year to see if I can up the yield on the poor producers.