HOPS – A gnarled mess of cones and flowers

Once we head into July and August and the days start getting shorter, the hops respond by diverting their energy into reproductive growth. The bines finally slow down their insanely fast upward climb, and thank goodness for that, because as you’ll see by the photos below, we now have a gnarled mess of nonsense at the tops of each pole. Once again, my engineering prowess is looking less and less brilliant when I consider how we are going to pull the gnarly bines off the climbing ropes in order to harvest them!

Now, instead of continuing to grow upwards like Jack’s magic beanstalk, I’m seeing the plants start to send out shoots laterally from the main bines, and these shoots are where the hops cones are eventually going to form. If you squint, you can see hints of these lateral shoots in the photos above. Before cones, however, we get flowers. The flowers are visually quite distinct from the cones, which will be the final stage of growth. However, the transition from flower to cone is a bit of a mystery to me. It seems likely that the cone is just a very mature flower. Certainly they appear topographically similar, not that this is a scientific analysis.

At this point, in mid-August, I can see a few cones forming in some areas of the hops, particularly up high or in spots that seem to get a lot of sun. Cones, as the name might imply, look very much like pine cones, only they are light green and leafy-soft instead of brown and hardened. The cones are just babies right now, no bigger than the width of my finger, but ready-to-harvest hops will be about 1.5 to 2 inches long and will start to dry out. On our plants, there seems to be a pretty big spread between newly formed flowers and fairly mature cones, all on the bines at the same time, which might make the timing of harvest a bit tricky. We ideally want all the cones to be equally mature and papery-dry when we harvest.

Just a final note on growing new hops from seeds. To get actual seeds for new plantings, flowers must of course be pollinated. Hops actually grow male and female flowers on separate plants, and for beer brewing, typically only female plants are grown in order to prevent pollinated seeds from developing. I have no idea what we are growing, but I’ve never encountered “seeds” so my assumption is that we have a fully female hops garden. Google seems to concur. All is not lost, however. Hops is also easily propagated through rootstock or rhizomes. I had to dig out a patch of hops to make way for a separator path between our vegetable garden and the hopes patch, and I gave the clumps of roots to my friend Mary. She took them home about 2 or 3 weeks later to plant in her garden and I’m happy to report that they seem to have taken! (At this point, please refer to the first hops post regarding whether or not you can also have some of my root stock).

The next post will cover harvest! I am excited, although Jeff continually reminds me that it “sucks”.