Michigan Hops Farm - Weekend Warriors go at it again

This last weekend of April, our family (4 kids) all came home.  It was a good time to get some labor intensive tasks done in the hop yard.

Our daughters are taking their first ride up in the scissor lift.

Laura described the experience like a "junky carnival ride" after hearing the lift squeak and feeling a swaying motion when the wind caused the basket to sway.

Howie teases his sister with another new tool while she tries to assist with pole straightening tasks. 

Stephanie learns to drive the tractor.

Laura delights in testing the properties of the new flame weeder while Howie and Amber stand back for safety reasons.

Howard and Howie are hard at work adjusting tensions on some of the trellis cables.

Stephanie has become bored with her job of leveling and begins practicing her Jedi skills.

Laura is weeding around the second year plants.

Stephanie distributes some old bales of mulch straw to the expansion area of our hops farm.  The straw will decompose and add humus to the soil.

Amber clips early season growth off of the plants.  Many of the plants have frost damage on the tips from the overnight freezing temperatures we have been experiencing here in Western Michigan.

Even though it looks like we did lots of goofing off, we got lots of work accomplished on our hops farm today.  We enjoyed spending the day working and playing with our family.

Spring Happenings at Black Creek Hops

2012 is going to be a busy year for us at Black Creek Hops.  I was still busy working 60 plus hours per week in the heart of tax season when the new hops rhizomes arrived.  I ordered them from a large supplier in the Northwest.  With the mild weather we had in March, there was no reason to delay giving the Crystal, Spalt, Tettnang, Galena and Sterling hops a chance to get an early start. I took a break on a Sunday afternoon to get them planted.

I gathered up all the miscellaneous planting pots I could find in my greenhouse and prepared to get dirty.

I use a mix of organic garden soil and bagged manure to give the rhizomes a healthy start.

It is really important to label the rhizomes immediately upon planting.  I use popsicle sticks with the variety written on each stick, the most economical method I could think of.

Here we are in Mid April.  Tax season is over and we can begin our work out in the hops yard.  Howard is replacing one of the poles from our very first trial year row.  The old pole was planted in the wrong place and was out of alignment with the rest of the newer poles which we planted in 2011.

The field is green.  This is a very good thing.  Last fall I successfully planted rye seed and clover as a cover crop.  The rye and clover help to prevent soil erosion in the winter and spring months.  Rye grass helps discourage pesky weeds from growing and clover adds nitrogen to the soil.

Here is a close up view of one of the 2nd year hops plants.  This is some very vigorous growth.  At this time last year, there were barely any sprouts appearing.  In the middle of the growth there is a stalk which is dark and bent over.  This is the result of the heavy frosts which we have experienced in the past few weeks in western Michigan.  Luckily, hops are very resilient plants and new shoots will take over for the fallen ones.

Some of the bines are reaching, looking for their strings to grow on.  They are going to have to wait a few more weeks.

I have spotted my first enemy for the season.  There seems to be numerous butterflies near our yard.  I believe this is the Eastern Comma Butterfly.  I did a little research and found out that another name for this species is Hop Merchant.  This species happens to love hops.  I am dreading the caterpillar stage for this insect.  They feast on hop leaves at night.  The best way to control them is to manually pick the caterpillars off the bines.  Yuck!!!!  I am thinking I might like to go back to my office job in a few weeks.

Howard has finished replacing the old pole and now he is adjusting the tension on the overhead wires in this very first row of our yard.  He wants to get everything "right" in the first row before we move on to setting up the trellis in the remainder of the hop yard.  Another long day.  Plenty more to come.

Yet another task completed.  We took a trip to visit a fellow hops grower up in northern Michigan today to pick up a bale.  This bale contains 2400 strings of coir rope, imported from somewhere over in the Indian Ocean area of the world.  These are the strings which the hops plants are begging for so they can begin their upward spiraling growth. 

Michigan Hops Yard in the Fall

October arrived and there was still a lot of work to do in the hops yard after the harvest.

Howard installed a much needed irrigation sytem.  Lots of planning and calculating went into the design.  This system will provide water to our existing 1 acre hop yard and meet the watering needs of our future expansion yard.

While Howard finished up the irrigation system, I pruned the 1st year hops bines back to the ground level and removed all of the bines from the yard.

We also decided it would be wise to give our yard a jump start for next year by seeding in some annual rye and some clover for a cover crop between the rows.  Doing this also helps to prevent erosion of the top soil during the harsh winter months.

Small but trusty, my Scott's spreader gave me a workout walking up and down the aisles of poles spreading the seeds.

Newest arrival on Michigan Hops Farm: Scissor Lift

Catch up time...been away from the blog for a few months so I have some new things to report.

After our looney attempts at picking hops from ladders and sides of hay wagons (see my most recent post prior to this one if you missed it) this summer Howard and I decided it was "high" time to invest in a piece of equipment that will allow us to safely access our highest hops.

 And here we have it, our fun and adventurous scissor lift, recently retired from a college football stadium here in the great state of Michigan.  
                                         
   

Unloading at the farm......

Trying it out.....wheee!

It drives down the rows and goes up and down.

We took our friends, Lisa and John for a ride one Sunday morning this fall. It gets a little creepy up on top if the wind is blowing. I kind of felt like we were going for a carnival ride.

The view from the top is pretty spectacular.

Looking down upon the apple tree at the northeast corner of our hops yard.  Off in the distance is the pumpkin crop growing on our farm this season. 

  Our hops bines are all removed from the yard at this point, but the view of the pumpkin field being harvested adjacent to our hops yard is quite magnificent.

The Harvesting of Hops

By early July, cones were already forming on the Northern Brewer, Hallertau and Perle varieties.  A long spell of hot dry weather seemed to contribute to early maturation of the cones.

In early August, our many of the hops were ready to be harvested.

This being our first year of having hops grower higher than our reach we had to devise a method of harvest which allowed us to reach the cones which were 16 ft above the ground.  We wanted to increase our yields by harvesting several times, so we opted to pick the hops directly into buckets and leave the bines in the hop yard until the final harvest.

This was accomplished by using Howard's long reach and a very long ladder perched against one of the old hay wagons.

The hops cones were sliced in half to determine readiness.  The lupulin content is present and appears to be dark yellow in color.

Later in the season, the bines were cut down from the high wire for the final harvest.  This was a very risky task for Howard.  Next year with over 600 plants, this method will have to be abolished.

The Nugget variety was the last of the hops to be harvested in early September.

The bed of our brand new pick up truck served the purpose of hauling hops to our barn very nicely.

Back in the barn, the hops cones are plucked from the bines and sorted into buckets.  Only the best are used for brewing.  Any cones showing signs of wind damage will be used for making hops pillows, a side product of our operation.

Our daughter Stephanie harvest the cones from our trial Magnum plants



Howie and Amber picked the 1st year Nugget hops.  They have some brilliant plans for using hops in new cooking recipes.



Hops are prone to Japanese Beetle attacks

In Mid July, I noticed a few of the 1st year plants had japanese beetles crawling on them.
I had heard of Japanese beetle traps.  They are very effective according to our farm neighbors.

I ventured off to the local box stores to buy a few of these traps. It turns out that lots of folks are experiencing Japanese beetle problems this summer.  The traps were in short supply.  We purchased six of them and hung them at the west end of our plot.

We also hung one way up on the top of the trellis for the 2nd year plants.  Even though there wasn't huge evidence of Japanese beetle presence here we thought we should protect the bines which were just beginning to flower.

The beetles are attracted to the traps by the scent of a solid disc which is lodged above the bag.  The results are immediate.  The bugs fly into the bag without hesitation.

Problem solved....or so we thought....

The following weekend we arrived at the hops yard to see this:  Our hops bines had been inhabited by thousands of Japanese Beetles.  The bags that we had hung were overflowing with rotten smelling dead bugs.  There were beetles all over our 2nd year plants.

The leaves were destroyed.  Japanese beetles eat the flesh of the leaves and a "lacy" skeleton of a leaf is all that remains.

The beetles also ate many of our Northern Brewer hops cones.  These will have to be discarded.  We lost over half of our early harvest varieties to Japanese beetles damage.

Frustrated, angry and disappointed, we sat down under our 2nd year hops bines to have a cold drink and rest in the shade.  As we sat there we noticed that the beetles seemed to be flocking towards the trap from the nearby swamp.  Could we be causing a greater problem by locating the trap directly next to our prized plants?  What if we placed the trap 50 feet away at the edge of the swamp? 

It turns out that by using these traps we caused greater problems than if we had not used them at all.  These traps need to be placed very strategically away from the plants you are trying to protect.

Once we moved the traps away from the plants the bug problem on the hops subsided.  We were able to salvage the remainder of our hops from more beetle damage.  Even thought the Nugget variety had considerable damage to the leaves, the flowers went on to produce cones free of bug damage.

We learned a valuable lesson the hard way.  One of many to come I'm afraid.

Growing crops of any kind is not easy.