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!

Trellis update....

I really want to post you guys something new and exciting! Sadly the majority of what we have been doing has been weeding and finishing guys wires for the main trellis. Hopefully in the next week or so I can get my trailer done to start setting up the hops run cables. That should make for some good times! See you soon!

Building the cable trellis...

Installing the trellis. That's Ben in the picture! Look at how tiny he is!

This past weekend was round one of installing the cables for the trellis! My older brother Ben came down to lend a VERY helpful hand! We had a lot of fun, tried some crazy stuff to get up to the tops of the 18' posts. Let's go for a ride and check it out.

This is the design I came up with...It's a V-trellis for double the production.

This is what it will look like from the ground.

To start off, my plan was to build a trailer for my tractor that would have a scaffold platform on it. The problem was, it would have taken half the day to build and Ben wanted to get cables up in the air. We decided that each of us would lug around a 32' extension ladder that happened to be on Ben's truck when he showed up. Lucky us!

That's me!

Let me put that into prospective, each one of those ladders weighs in at 72 pounds. I'm tired of carrying heavy things! And of course to top that off, our hop yard is on a hill. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, by noon, Ben and I had enough of the ladders.

We put our thinking caps on and came up with a solution. Use one of our hay wagons with the ladder in it. Let the tractor do the work! Oh and of course when the more dangerous stuff started happening, Crystal's father Bob showed up to help!

Don't worry OSHA, nobody is getting paid on this job!

 Working with the 1x7 5/16" EHS cable was a real treat. The stuff is tough as hell! It ended up taking longer than anticipated to hurdle some of the learning curves, so we ended up only getting the mains strung by the end of the day. Oh well, there is always next weekend.

Hops have Popped!!!

We didn't get a lot of work done in our hop yard this weekend. It was my sister-in-law Danielle's graduation from SUNY Brockport. We spent the weekend in Rochester, NY which was a blast! Always love hanging out with Danielle and Philip!

When we got back home today, our mission was to mow the hop yard and start cleaning up the dirt and rocks left over from digging the holes for the posts. What we found was a bunch of little Cascade hop plants sprouting from the ground! Woo-Hoo!! So far we have been successful at growing hops!!

Little wee-baby Cascade plants!

Our Chinook plants aren't up yet, but since they were planted a little later we aren't surprised!
Check back in a few more days!!

Standing up the Yard!!

In the construction of hop yards, this past weekend was one of the main events. We stood up all our posts!

The hop yard pre-post-plumbing!

 OK, so for those of you who don't know, hops are strung up on a trellis that has a height of 18 ft! Yep, you read that right, 18 ft!! So over the winter, Crystal, her father Bob, and I played in the woods cutting down locust trees and prepping them to 22 ft. That puts them 4 ft in the ground. Putting them in that deep protects them from frost heaving and gives them a good foundation so they don't fall over.

None of the tree was wasted, the tops turned into firewood to heat our house!

You guys have seen the previous posts of us using draw shaves to strip the bark at the bases of the posts. We did that so they wouldn't rot underground. The bark and sapwood layer hold a lot of moisture and when they are put underground, they tend to bring micro-organisms that expedite the decomposition process. So, strip them we did!

Stripped posts ready for service!

On Saturday, Crystal's step-father Eric, showed up with the backhoe ready to drill holes. We have a bit of experience drilling holes as we (Crystal, Eric, and me) have installed playgrounds for more than a decade. Eric for 15 years, Crystal for close to 13, and me (I married into the playground world) for 7 years. 

Eric on the backhoe drilling holes.

We use a backhoe with an auger attachment on the hoe so that we can drill and not have to drive around to get the dirt off the auger. Beats a skid steer any day!

We drilled and drilled, there were quite a few holes. While we made holes all over the field, Bob brought posts down with the four wheeler!

Every post needs a hole! I've got some drilling to do! 

I even put Crystal to work cleaning the auger off!

When we FINALLY got all the holes drilled, which took about four or five hours, we were ready to start tamping the bases of them and standing up the posts. I put Crystal and my sister-in-law Danielle in charge of tamping. That's when the fun began!

I put Crystal in charge of tamping the holes while Eric and I stood up posts. Notice the tiny 4 ft long tamp!

Eric and I took off with the tractor and a set of log tines, and rigged it so that we could stand up 22 ft long trees. Not so bad when you have hydraulics and a little bit of ingenuity!

One going up!

 We used a board in the hole that allowed the post to ride down without cutting the walls of the holes and filling it in. Worked like a charm. Once we got our rhythm we were setting a post about every 45 seconds to a minute. 25 post in under 20 minutes. We were jamming! The tamping girls couldn't keep up! Maybe we should have given them hydraulics!

 After all the posts were set, everybody went home. It was time for a much needed break! And some very tall beers!

Last post in the hole!

DONE!

We are so grateful for all the help!

Sunday morning we rolled out of bed, with a bit a soreness....and went back to work. My lovely wife and I still had to plant rhizomes and plumb posts. We decided we would plant all our Cascade rhizomes first.

Crystal planting Cascade rhizomes

240 of those little kids got stuffed in the ground and we were off to plumb those 18 ft high posts! Geez, who's idea was this?!? This is a lot of work!

Onward we pushed! Crystal and I plumbed those posts like it was our business, oh wait, it is! Crystal shoveled dirt in and I tamped the crap out of it! Yea, my shoulders are still sore. But we got it done! And it was pretty incredible, it wasn't two minutes after we finished plumbing the last post that a gorgeous rainbow appeared over our hop yard! I would say that's a pretty good sign!

The perfect end to a LONG weekend!

Thank you to everyone that helped with this crazy weekend!

Coming soon will be the construction of the cable trellis that will support the hop bines!

Standing up the Yard...the trailer

This weekend was a busy one! I'll get a full post out in the next couple of days! Here's a teaser for those interested. We stood up the trellis posts this weekend!

Tilling The Rows!! Take 2....

Tilling the rows has pretty much turned into manual labor! We were unable to find a tiller that would bust the sod up the way we wanted. So it has come down to a rake!

 

 

 

Crystal raking the rows!

Thankfully, my loving wife is more than willing to partake in this wonderful labor with me. Actually, to be honest, she is doing more of it than I am....

Yeah, I feel bad, I am being a wuss, I raked with her but ended up with blisters on my hand from the inferior rake! Stupid thing was full of slivers and burrs! At least that's my story!!! 

The one advantage we have is that Fiona seems to be pretty good at tilling up the dirt while playing with her bone.

Fiona kicking up dirt with her bone. And yes, I'm wearing purple gloves! Blisters hurt!

The progress is slow right now. Waiting patiently for the equipment to get here to drill holes and start standing up posts. Hopefully if all goes well, it will be this weekend. The trellis cable and hardware should be here by then also! That will make for a pretty cool post or two! 

For now, I guess we will continue to get the soil ready and maybe get rhizomes in the ground this week. If Crystal keeps driving the tractor we should be all set!

She loves the Wee-Baby-Tractor!

Tilling The Rows!!! Take 1.......

What a beautiful day to play in the hop yard! The weather here in Upstate NY is pretty amazing right now. Especially considering the horrendous winter we experienced this year! Being that it was almost 70 out today Crystal and I figured we would till the rows. 

Now mind you, we decided to do this hop yard on a budget mostly with the equipment and materials we have here on the farm and on the land. The locusts post came from the woods, the fields were part of the farm, the plow was found in one of the barns and retro fitted, and the plan was to use the farm tractors(we ended up buying a small tractor to toy with). 

So anyway, back to tilling the rows. We have a 5hp MTD rototiller that was "commandeered" from the family and we thought, "Aw heck, we can till with that!" 

I think I can, I think I can.....

Yea, about that, that was as much fun as going for a swim with a toaster! It was WAY too small for the job! So hopefully we can come up with a better solution fast, or before I bust my back any more with that thing! But hey, can't beat the view!

That's Bradley(the big Great Dane) and Fiona(the baby Boxer) and Crystal picking rocks!

At least we have two rows tilled! Only eight more to go!

Stripping bark....

I know I already posted today, but it was my first post so it doesn't count! We've been gradually stripping the remaining logs of their bark to get them prepped to be buried for the rest of their lives. 

Crystal using the draw shave to remove bark!

My wife is pretty amazing! She's all about this work.  It's tedious and labor intensive! One heck of a work out though! We're half way there!

Me shaving bark!

Starting our Hop Yard!

OK, so, I'm sure you are probably wondering who the heck I am... Well, I'm Greg and I love hops! With the help of my wonderful wife Crystal, we are going to start a hops farm in Ithaca, NY. 

Between the two of us, we have zero experience growing hops. The advantage we do have is that both of us grew up around farming. Crystal's father was a farmer all his life and she had serious exposure to agricultural farming. I, on the other hand, grew up in a family of office dwelling parents. Lucky for me, my older brother was keen on finding trouble while we lived in the city, so my parents moved us to the "country" where I ended up working for local farmers in my teen years. We bought my wife's father's farm and plan to convert the hay fields, little by little, into hop fields.

Hops

We are growing hops because I love beer. I make it, I buy it, I drink it, I love it. Our goal is to sell most of the hops we grow to local breweries. Although, I do want to keep some for my own use! In case you didn't know, hops are an integral part of beer! With out hops, those IPAs you love wouldn't have bitterness or crazy citrusy/piney aroma and flavor! Hops can impart so many different flavors depending on the cultivar used, time and/or amount added to the wort(unfermented beer), length of time dry hopped, amount used for dry hop, etc. Without hops, we would have to go back to using herbs and spices to balance the malt. It just wouldn't taste like beer. Well, at least not like beer that we have become accustom to!

Back to the farm! Our plan is to start with a half acre of hops. That's a whopping 480 plants! We are in process right now of constructing our hop yard! 

The plow wasn't heavy enough, so my father-in-law rode on it.

We dug up soil this past weekend to establish the rows for the little guys to grow up in. 

Hop yard in the works!

Ha, I say little guys, right now they are just tiny little baby rhizomes sitting dormant in a dorm fridge.

Fridge full of rhizomes

In a couple of years when they reach maturity (squeaky puberty voice and all!) they will reach 18 feet tall growing at as much as a foot a day and produce an astonishing 2 pounds of dried hops per bine!

Wikipedia

Oh, I forgot to mention, hops are a bine, I didn't misspell that, they are a BINE, not a vine! Weird right? You're curious as to what a bine is?  Well my friend, a bine is, "a climbing plant that climbs by its shoots growing in a helix around a support. It is distinct from a vine, which climbs using tendrils or suckers." (wikipedia.com). Awesome, eh? OK OK, I guess not all of us may be as nerdy about this stuff as I am, however, talking/writing about this gets me "hopped" up!

 

Poles for trellis

Right now I am working on finishing up the design of my trellis. In the next couple of weeks I will get pics posted of the construction of that. It should be pretty cool! In hind sight I should have done all of this last year, however, I kind of came up with the whole "Hops Farm" idea over the winter and didn't want to wait a year to start planting hops. So here we are. Impatient as I may be, I have high hops, haha, I mean hopes, for a great hops growing season!