This Years Hop Season Has Begun!

Spring 2016 Hop Shoots!

I know I am a little late getting back to the blog. We have done a lot of work on the hop yard already this spring. We got our trellis 99% complete! 

Trellis is close to finished!

One of the other things we are doing this year is mulching our rows to help combat the weeds. Thanks to our friends at Limbwalker Tree Service, we were able to secure some seasoned wood mulch. Oh, and of course there is a huge thanks to Terlouw Construction for hauling the mulch to the yard with me! Would have taken a while longer without his big dump truck. Even with the slight mishap on the first load.

Oops...

Luckily, no damage was done to the truck and it was a "simple" pull out with the tractor. I say "simple" because what you can't see in the picture is the other ditch at the front of the truck. Yea, as you can guess, the tractor pulled and the front end dumped into the other ditch. Anyway, they were able to get out, and on with progress we went. 

Successful mulch dump...

Eric and I hauled a few loads and the morning was gone, but the mulch was here! Crystal and I got to work spreading it down the rows.

Strange, again with the wife looking like she does all the work...

So, really, I hauled the mulch and Crystal spread it out. We were able to get a couple rows done before we had to call it a day to go see some friends for a birthday celebration! 

Two rows down, Eight to go!

Next time I will spend a little more time bringing you all up to speed on what this year will look like. Thanks for stopping! More to come soon!

Hop Trailer Build...

OK OK, I don't want to hear it. I know it's been a while since I have last posted. Well, actually since June. Sorry about that. We have been really busy, and with the rain in the beginning of the season, we ran into some complications with our trellis. So, we finally got back to work on a project that I had started back in June, our trailer for getting up to the top of the trellis.

The idea was to build a trailer that would accept standard scaffold stacked two sections high, giving us enough height to get to the 18 feet tall cables. Oh and of course, just like everything else we have done with this hop yard, we wanted to do it on a very small budget. So we set out into the abyss of old used equipment that was scattered around the farm to find a trailer that was worth re-purposing. As luck would have it, there was an old manure spreader that was in rough shape that we could use.

I started out by cutting everything nonessential off of the frame. By the time I got done cutting away all the the rusted and weak steel I realized I was down to the axle and the tongue of the trailer. So I ran to our local steel store and ordered a couple of rails to reattach everything as a trailer. I drilled and drilled and drilled. There were a lot of holes to bolt it together. After a few hours of drilling and bolting I ended up with a trailer that would accept standard scaffold.

We had a few sections of old mason scaffold hanging around the farm that I grabbed up to attach to the trailer. Sadly we didn't have enough braces for all of the scaffold so I had to build it with wood to make it a little more stable. We will end up ordering some new scaffold more for the safety of whoever is up on it. I also decided the rust look wasn't cutting it for our "new" trailer so a few rattle cans of spray paint later we had some color.

We didn't bother painting the scaffold as we will soon change it out with new. After finding a few more braces and having my lovely wife hand up the second sections of scaffold I was able to start building a deck with what we had to work with.

The old scaffold was tough to get together!

After a ton of banging with a hammer I got them together!

So away I went building a deck to make it so that we could stand up top and work on the high trellis. We had a ton of lumber in one of the barns stacked up from when we took down one of the old buildings on the property. I made great use of that material. 

 

I attached the deck to the scaffold by sandwiching the upright frames. This gave the unbraced uprights a little more stability. After it was all together all I had left to do was drive it down to the hop yard and test it out.

Perfect height. The cable behind me is 18 feet in the air.

It works like a charm! I was able to get the cables tightened back up. And now we are ready for the rest of the cables to be run! Hopefully we can start that this week! Thanks for following!