Hop roots will spread quickly and take over the garden unless you separate them and trim the roots each season. Hops should be planted in the Spring, late enough to avoid a frost. Fertilize liberally before planting. Plant your hops in a mound and aerate the ground by turning it over several times to aid drainage, enhance growth and prevent disease. Place the rhizomes about 4 inches deep, and make your mound of soil about a foot high to aid drainage.
Place the root side of the rhizome down. Cover the mound with some straw or light mulch to inhibit the weeds. The hop bines grow vertically and require some kind of trellis.
Your trellis could some heavy rope or twine going from ground level to your roof, or a few poles securely mounted in the ground. If using rope, select rough twine-like rope so the bines can grab onto it. The trellis should be strong and secure. Hops also enjoy lots of water and sunlight.
In the dry climates or the heat of summer, they may need to be watered daily. Once the hops begins to grow, select the best bines and wrap them around your trellis to train them.
You will need to train the hops for a few days, but eventually they will begin growing in a clockwise direction from east to west around your trellis. Train the best shoots and trim the rest off. Your hops will continue to grow throughout the summer, and will be ready to harvest by late summer. To determine when to harvest, you need to examine the cones. Mature hop cones will be dry to the touch, springy, have a very strong aromatic hop odor, and leave yellow lupulin powder on your fingers.
Check the cones every day or two, and when you think they are ripe, pick one and open it. It should be filled with thick yellow-gold lupulin powder if it is fully ripened.
The hops may not all ripen at once, but you need to harvest each as it ripens. Dry the hops out in a warm dry spot in your house, and keep them away from sunlight.
Sunlight can seriously damage picked hops. A paper bag is a good place to store them while drying. The hops should dry out in a week or two. After that, place them in a sealed bag and store the hop cones in your freezer.
Remove as much oxygen as possible from the bag to avoid oxidization. Cut the bines back to 3 feet or so after harvesting. The winter frost will kill off the bines, after which you can cut them back further and cover them until Spring.
When Spring comes, take a spade and cut around the rhizome to trim the roots back to about a foot. Trimming the roots will prevent the hops from consuming your entire garden, as they tend to spread rapidly. Add some fertilizer, fresh mulch and a new trellis and you will be ready to grow hops for a fresh new season. You can use this hop canopy as a shade-producing element for a beer garden—a nice place to enjoy a homebrew and view your hops! Make sure to carefully monitor the bines from reaching over to other plants.
Planting months vary from region to region. Do a little research as to what time is best for where you live e. February in California, April in Colorado. You can purchase a pH testing kit from your local gardening store. If your soil pH is low, use a form of lime or wood ashes to reduce acidity.
Likewise, if your soil pH is high, you can use aluminum sulfate and sulfur found at your local gardening store or nursery to reduce alkalinity. Dig a one-foot deep hole and add a shovelful of compost, which makes the soil nutrients more available to the roots, then add two to three handfuls of mycorrhizal inoculum, a symbiosis of fungi and plant roots that aids in nutrient uptake and root growth of the plant. Plant three to six rhizomes two inches below the soil surface so the shoots point upward.
When putting the rhizomes in the soil, make sure each area of rhizome varieties is three to five feet apart to avoid root mixing. After putting the rhizomes in the ground with your remaining dirt, put another inch of compost over top and then two inches of mulch, which will prevent weed growth and protect young plants from any late frost.
Hops will absorb additional nutrients of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen through the air. Other helpful nutrients you can purchase are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium generally referred to as N-P-K. A common rate is five pounds of fertilizer per square feet one handful per plant.
Fertilizer schedules vary, but in general you should fertilize on the first sprout, then three weeks later, then once in mid-summer and once at the beginning stages of flowering. Properly identifying these stages will help you better understand the plant and determine what needs to be done to ensure ideal yield come harvest time. As the saying goes, first they sleep, then they creep and last they leap.
As the years progresses, your hop plants will mature into mean, green cone-growing machines. Mature plants over three years old require root pruning in early spring. Without it, rhizomes will spread throughout the year, hoarding nutrients and water from the crown needed by the shoots. In the first year of growth, let the plant grow without any pruning.
In the following years, as the bines begin to grow, you can prune the first spring shoots to encourage more robust secondary shoot growth. Once these shoots are one to two feet tall, pick two or three shoots to train clockwise from the top.
As the season continues, continuing training your hops by trimming back the untrained shoots to ground level and mulching to keep the weeds down. After the hop burrs the beginning stage of flowering that shows white feelers budding off the tips of the plant have appeared, you can cut away the lowest four feet of foliage and lateral branches to aid in air circulation and reduce disease development.
The removal of the lower leaves must be done carefully to avoid breaking or kinking the main stem. In late summer, allow bottom growth to promote hardiness of the crown and the plant vigor for the following year.
Hops require a lot of water, especially in their first year. The older the plant, the less frequent the watering. In areas where irrigation is necessary, never apply overhead water such as a sprinkler system. This will create a moist environment that is disease prone. A drip irrigation system is the most water-efficient method.
Consider building this cheap drip irrigation system to keep your hops thirst quenched. Be patient. Just lots and lots of hop cones on harvest day. Just like us, hop plants can get sick. Aphids can even transmit plant viruses from one victim to another.
Mildew is caused by a few varieties of fungus, which can infect your plant, colonize, stunt growth, and sully the bines that do manage to grow and climb. The best way to deal with these fungi is to remove the affected parts of your plant or employ a fungicidal remedy. Read up on which hop varieties grow best in your location and ask local hop farmers about their experiences.
Whether or not you choose to plant your rhizomes indoors or outdoors, location is everything. Any less sunlight may mean a small harvest if any cones grow at all. With this in mind, pick a place by a window that sees a lot of sun or try planting your hops along the side of your house.
Hop plants are known to grow incredibly fast, which is part of the reason it can be so satisfying to grow them for yourself! But fear not! Hop plants can be trained to grow upwards and then horizontally, so an arch over a window or over a garden path could be in your future. In his case, the dirt in his region was heavy in clay and therefore resistant to draining.
Ensure that your soil is loose so that it will drain properly, and if you plan to let your hops grow in pots indoors, drill some holes in the bottom of your planting container before placing on a tray to catch the run-off.
Hop plants may be thirsty, but they should never be allowed to sit with water for too long! Also, hop plants prefer a slightly acidic soil. Choosing where to purchase your rhizomes is one of the most important decisions you can make. Remember those pesky hop plant diseases we mentioned? Associates at another campus of the University of Florida also brought in rhizomes from a larger supplier and those plants were discovered to have Downy Mildew, a killer of hop plants.
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