Hop farm season 2

It’s been an incredibly warm spring in Minnesota. We were briefly hitting mid-70’s as early as the second week in March. Though it cooled off quite a bit later in March and early April, my hop plants took early-March’s cue and started to come up. Check out the Centennial plant on April 7th:

I uncovered all the plants a week later so I could bury the chicken wire around them to keep the rabbits away. They’d already chewed a few bine shoots before I caged up the plants. Bastards!

Here are all the plants after I uncovered them on 4/14 prior to caging them up:

Centennial

Chinook

Hallertau

Cascade

Northern Brewer

While digging to bury the cage around the Centennial plant, I spotted a rhizome so I cut it off in case anyone I knew wanted to plant it and see if it would be successful in their yard.

Year two’s yield is going to blow year 1’s out of the water, I can already tell! I’m probably going to have to just invite a bunch of guys from the brew club over to do a harvesting party and let them take what they harvest. I still have some hops left from 2011 with limited storage space…

All caged up!