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!