Results from the 2015 hop experiment

As predicted, my hop vines easily cleared the top of each of their respective lines by mid-summer. Even the Super Alpha made it to the top after the initial damage was done. After each reached the top of their lines they began to really fill out and beef up to the point where the taught steel cable began to bow (more on this in a second).











Here is an artsy picture of the Super Alpha as it's just making it to the top of it's line and reaching out to find more room to grow.













Each vine had a lot farther to climb than the amount of line and space that I gave them this year. From my standpoint it was much easier to just let them run wild and grow on their own up their lines than to train them weekly back to their horizontal canopy line like last year. Even though this probably limits their potential for growth and yield a bit, I'll probably continue to do it this way in the future as long as I can figure out a way around the big problem that I ran into with harvesting them.

My whole scheme of growing the hops this way (up the lines to the steel cable) had unknowingly relied on the assumption that come harvest time that I'd be strong enough to detach the main carabiner, which connected the steel cable to the building next to the second story window, and then could lower the steel cable to the ground for harvesting of the vines. As I noted above, my vines gained some substantial mass as they climbed and filled out with fresh hops to pick. The weight of the vines made even budging the main carabiner from the eye screw that held it to the building all but impossible.  

The result of my inability to detach the min carabiner was that I was forced to improvise to bring the hop vines down. Initially I thought I could lighten the vine load enough just by cutting the bottom half of the vines down, and then still continue to move forward with my original plan of detaching the main carabiner.





So now that I had my 6 vines dangling in the wind (and scooting towards the middle of the bowed cable) I tried the main carabiner once more with similar results of barely making it budge from the eye screw. As you can see the sun was beginning to set after a long day of trying to harvest, so I admitted defeat and slept on finding a solution that would enable me to harvest the majority of my hop bounty that still remained stranded in midair.

Well they say that you can't rush a good idea, and I couldn't figure out a way to even get them down for a few days(let alone harvest them), so the rest of my hops literally died on the vine to the point that they weren't worth harvesting any more. But I still had to get them down somehow...

So I borrowed my dad's tree branch cutting saw on a stick and hacked them down in vengeance/defeat. So many hops wasted.

But on the bright side I can show you how it was supposed to work with letting down the main steel cable for harvesting.

And of course all was not lost since I harvested the bottom third of the vines.As you can see the Super Alpha on the right had the worst yield and some of them were starting to brown since I waited to harvest them until late September. I've given them to my friends at Urban Artifact for a brewing of their choice and hopefully we'll sell the beer for some sort of fundraiser for Tender Mercies. That's the plan right now anyways.

Better luck next year and I've got a new to come up with a better plan for letting down the steel cable. If you have a better idea let me know.