Recommended Hop growing medium

SO we just built our hop beds.  They are 1 foot raised beds out of landscaping timbers and i am trying to figure out what to fill them with.  We where thinking about a blend of peat moss and organic compost with some vermiculite for drainage.  Anyone wiht experience that could weigh in would be great.  Also looking for a good fertilized suggestion.  Ive seen people mention a fish based fertilizer, but a brand and what to look for ( #-#-# suggestions) would be great.

Cheers,
Jeff

I’m no expert on soil.  Hops are like weeds.  They’ll grow very well in pretty much any kind of soil.  They love nitrogen.  Look for fertilizers like 10-0-0 or 20-0-0 or something like that.

Coconut core is more environmentally friendly compared to peat moss. If you care about that sort of thing.

They like acidic based fertilizers. Like said above, it doesn’t take much to get them rolling. I planted some last year in 1 foot mounds of top soil mixed with manure and humus compost. They got watered regularly. They grew anywhere from 12’ to 18’ high and produced a nice yield of cones. I recommend getting them in the ground ASAP. If you’re worried about freezing still, just cover with a heavy layer of mulch. You should mulch anyways, it’s good for retaining moisture especially in dryer months of the summer.

Oregon extension recommends high N - low P - high K for soils in commercial hop growing areas of Oregon.  I believe that recommendation to be valid for other soils.

My entire garden is basically a 70/30 mix of basic Illinois topsoil and composted manure and the hops grow really well. The site is regularly irrigated and once per month I hit them with nothing more than Miracle Gro through a jug sprayer. Last year was their second year in, 22’ feet and each plant yielded about half a pound wet.

This year has been slow to take off, soil temperatures are still in the low to mid 40’s below grade, just saw some tips emerging over the weekend, all looking healthy. They are pretty hardy plants and not really difficult to grow.

I agree with the above comments. If you have decent luck growing other vegetables/herbs/fruit in your native soil then you’ll probably be fine using your topsoil mixed with compost and some mulch on top to retain moisture. If you have problems growing other stuff then you might want to look at buying topsoil to fill in the raised bed and mix that with compost. That’s what I did.

work in some beneficial fungus and the fertilizer needs will be reduced. the fungi will free up a lot more nutrients and make them available to the plants. plant some nitrogen fixers with them (you’ve got the trellis already, grow some peas!) that you have inoculated with the correct bacteria and the soil will fertilize itself over the years with generous top dressing in spring and fall

Wanna dumb that down a little for me?

sure. Well I’ll try anyway.

In a healthy balanced system insects, bacteria, and even more so, fungus break down dead organic matter and make the nutrients held in them available again for new plant life. There are some really good products available from Paul Stamets that are designed to introduce lots of fungus to the soil in your garden to help make these nutrients available so as long as you have plenty of available organic matter (compost) given time, air, and moisture, the fungi will make most of the nutrients your hops need available to them with out needing to add a lot of concentrated macro nutrients (fertilizer).

However the main macro nutrient that we as ‘farmers’ like our plants to have a lot of is nitrogen because it helps the plants get really big really fast. miracle grow has lots of inorganic nitrogen which is highly available so plants get big fast. ‘Organic’ fertilizers like fish emulsion do the same thing to a lesser. The problem there is that you are trapped in the cycle of feeding that way. the plants grow so fast that they start to use up all the other macro and micro nutrients in the soil and because you are of course carefully preventing mold and bugs and ‘weeds’ from encroaching on your garden very little of this is getting replaced through the normal pathways of nature. so you end up with soil that gets poorer and poorer until, without your inputs, it is totally dead and unable to support life.

Legumes, or more specifically species of bacteria that co-habitat with legumes and some other plants, have the unusual habit of taking nitrogen out of the air and ‘fixing’ it in the soil in little nodules which is good because the process of decomposition ties up nitrogen and can cause some loss of available nutrient as the dead organic matter is decomposed into soil.

Enter the fungi which will grow mycilium (the whitish fuzzy mold like part of a mushroom that grows in the substrate) around the roots of your plants. These mycilium take the larger compounds which are difficult for your plants to absorb, break them down into smaller pieces and use some of it. other parts that the fungi don’t really need anyway are passed through to the roots of the plants. In return the plants will share some of their moisture and carbohydrates with the fungi.

you won’t get quite the same level of rapid growth and huge yields you might get with a concentrated chemical fertilizer application but then, as Denny is fond of pointing out, after a few years you are likely to get more hops than you can use anyway. This way you don’t have to wear protective clothes to care for your plants and if you forget to feed or water for a couple weeks they are more likely to survive on their own.

it’s pretty hippie dippy and touchy feely but it works.

Check out this site. I am in no way affiliated with this company. I have used their grow your own edible mushroom kits and that’s fun. But I’ve seen Paul Stamets talk and he’s got some very very cool ideas.

http://www.fungi.com/

I apologize for any scientific simplifications of errors I might have made in the above post. It was some what off the top of my head.

Yeah! What he said lol. No, really… This is great information. Thanks for taking the time to enlighten us, Jonathan!

Great mini-lecture there, Jonathan.  I hadn’t thought about growing legumes in my hops bed, but it’s a good idea.  Do you plant those on the off-season?  Here in MN, I might be able to start a fall crop of something before the frost sets in, but I’m not sure.  I’m usually harvesting in mid to late September.  That gives me maybe 6 weeks tops before things are done for the year.

I started out with really clay-heavy soil wit plenty of rocks.  Glacial deposits.  I tilled the ground as deeply as possible, going back over it again after picking some rocks.  Then I added a large amount of composted horse manure.  My neighbor had a huge pile going back to 4 years old, so I chose the really well-aged stuff.  I also prepared the holes with a bit of wood ash, I think.  Some compost helped too.  Since then I’ve only added compost to the beds.  I typically feed mid-season by pulling back some of the mulch (dry grass clippings) and side-dressing with vermicompost.  The worm castings are a great soil amendment.

The soil mix you suggested, Jeff, sounds like a basic square-foot-garden mix.  I’ve had really good results using that soil mix before, both in shallow beds and also deep beds.  We grew carrots in a deep bed with about 11" of that soil mix, and they were huge!  So I know you’d have good root growth that way.  The problem I see with that is that the soil is really loose and airy.  Your crowns wouldn’t be anchored well, and once the wind starts whipping your hops bines around I’d think you could end up with some uprooting.  Hard to say.  Also, the rhizomes would travel really easily through that soil and completely take over the bed.  If you do use that soil mix, I’d keep it to one variety.  I’ve had one really vigorous plant send rhizomes out about 12 feet away along the border of my hops bed.  And that’s through fairly heavy soil!

Personally, I’d save the SFG mix for growing some veg, and go with amended native soil for your hops bed.

Here’s a shot of the whole garden:

And a zoom in of the hops beds:

And finally one from up top:

Whoa, very nice ! Love the trellises.

I hereby request that Jonathan give a presentation at 2015 NHC on sustainable hobby hop growing for homebrewers.

Thanks for all the great replies!

Mort,
We already plan to plant beans in with the Hops just because they thrive in a shaded arrangement(my buddy is the gardener, im sure he knew about your nitrogen stuffs.

El_Cap

Thats interesting about the soil being so loose the hops will stretch out a lot.

Here are the beds we have built for the hops.

I ordered 4 rhizomes of 4 different varieties.  each variety will essentially have a 2x8 Section of bed to grow in. Im assuming we will lose about 25% of our rhizomes for one reason or another, but i dont think we will be overplanting to much.  Can you define the Amended Native Soil mix you mention?

Cheers,
Jeff

Jeff, when I first started growing them back in the late 80’s/early 90’s I was living in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and they grew like weeds!  Most growing instructions for hops suggest that they like “deep, well drained soils”.  What that statement is getting at is beyond most folks comprehension in that the soil you see when you start digging your planting hole will continue down at least a few feet.  These regions have usually been created by some sort of glacial activity and many times are associated with areas of grape production (they also like deep well drained soils)

A few years later I moved back to Ohio and the hops came with me.  They still grew like weeds but not like they did in the ‘real’ soil.  We’re lucky to have 8 inches of heavy-textured soil above really heavy clay here in NE Ohio.  I generally try to dig as big a hole as I can, maybe 3 feet into the clay, and then backfill with blend of the native soil and amend that with as much organic matter as I can.  During rainy years you can encounter the ‘teacup effect’ where the water follows the path of least resistance and fills your original hole creating a soggy condition for your roots, but it’s the best I can come up with.  The additional digging/excavating will allow some monster roots to make their way deeper into the soil which in turn lessens the amount of additional water you have to supply.

Some additional points that were touched on are also correct.  When you provide a good soil environment you can encourage mycorrhizae to inhabit your roots which will keep the microbes happy and in return, they’ll help to keep the roots happy.  Lively, happy soil makes all parties involved happy!

One other point that some folks overlook, and can sometimes get them in the jackpot, is that you should have at least a 4 foot periphery around each crown so you can keep the rhizomes in check.  Usually, at the beginning of your third growing season, you’re gonna want to start pruning the crown.  Basically you’re just digging about an 8-10 inch deep trench/moat all the way around each crown.  By doing this, you’ll find any rhizomes that are creeping away from the crown as they’ll grow outward from the center like the spokes on a bicycle wheel.  I’ve seen situations where they’ve been grown right up next to a stone wall, railroad tie wall and many other types of fixed obstructions, and that’s not good because once a rhizome finds a nook or cranny . . . it’s off to the races.  This also happens when growers try to contain them with a 4x4 or some other type of border as when they hit the obstruction they end up growing along it due to not having to grow through soil.

Once the trench is dug and rhizomes cut, it’s a really good idea to backfill with some nice compost and then throw the soil you excavated back on top.  Doing this on a yearly basis makes digging the rhizomes easier and easier each season.

Sorry for the blather but it’s worked for me for many years.  Hoppy Trails~

By “amended native soil” I just meant that you can add some compost or composted manure, wood ash, and maybe some sand into your existing soil.  I found that the manure really broke up the clay soil a lot.  I did that in the main garden too.  The photos I posted are from the 3rd year in a newly-created garden patch.

I started my hopyard about 7 years ago and was working with info from freshops.com.  If you click through the tabs on that link you’ll find some decent info.

The main thing is that you want to enrich the soil with some compost or rotted manure and make sure it drains well.

As for fertilizing, I prefer to stay away from chemical concentrates.  I think compost does the job really well.  However, even with a 3-bin system and 2 worm bins, I always seem to be short on compost.  Maine gardener Eliot Coleman suggests an organic base fertilizer mix that is made from equal parts of greensand, bloodmeal, and soft rock phosphate.  I had to source these from Amazon.  I’m not sure what the NPK ratio works out to be with an even mix of these.

You’ll want to go with more nitrogen at the start to promote green leafy growth.  When the burrs start to form, then you can boost the phosphorus and cut back on nitrogen.  Miracle Grow does sell a product called ‘Bloom Booster’ which is for just that reason, although I’ve since shied away from Miracle Grow and other concentrates.

Also, you should stop fertilizing as the cones mature and give the plants maybe a week or two with plain water.  I’ve read that late fertilizing can impart bad flavors to hops (and other plants related to hops…)

Keep in mind that I’m still learning a lot about the whole gardening world and I’m no expert.  Have fun with the new project!

Another thing not mentioned that’s outside of the realm of soil is sunlight. Hops like the sunlight.

THe beds we built are in direct sun most of the day, after 4-5pm is when they wont be in sunlight i believe.

That’s good. Morning sun is the best.