Trellis Triumphant

So much has happened in the last few months at the farm I don't know where to start! Spring has sprung forward like a jack-in-the-box and all of a sudden we find ourselves tending to second year hops planted under an almost-finished one-acre trellis! How did that happen!?

Let's take a few steps back:

We tried to install all the trellis poles last fall but an early winter caused us to rethink our schedule. So as soon as the ground thawed the first week of March, we were eager to complete the 88-pole trellis. We called up Jason and he was quick to return, this time with a Deere 50C excavator. Not too big not too small, this machine proved to be far more effective than a power auger. There's just no way an auger would be able to penetrate the aggregate rock we discovered at depths of about 3' and sometimes shallower.

Working quickly, we were able to sink one pole every 5-10 minutes. With the interior poles complete, we could now even out the lumps and bumps of the hop yard. Our budget solution was to drag a grader blade up, down, and across the rows from behind our F150. The blade was fixed to an old towing V and chained to the the truck hitch and we were off to the races in fine 'Chariots of Fire' style.

In my next post, I'll fill you in on all things compost...

Tim in the F150 discovering a wee dip in the terrain with Jason quick to the rescue!

A Monday Morning Hike

With no pressing duties on the farm, it was finally time to go and explore our Majesty's hinterland. Just a few steps out the door and I was already on Crown Land rapidly climbing in elevation towards a destination I have been wanting to climb for over a year - Fountain Ridge.

This ridge is more entertaining than NBC's Thursday night Must See TV. Seriously, I would prefer to watch the ridge for half an hour than an episode of 30 Rock any day! There's just so much going on up there. For starters, its a magnet for raptors. Ravens use the steep precipice a place of worship, congregating there at sundown on random summer evenings. At least two pairs of red-tailed hawks have hooked up and are nesting on its slopes. Bald Eagles are often seen harassing these Red-tails for no good reason. Did I mention Golden Eagles, the Schwarzenegger of raptors!? Yup, there is one hanging out here, too. And at night, Great-horned and Barred Owls can be heard hooting their familiar calls half way up the slope.

Fountain Ridge has been tempting me for over a year. While taking a break to stretch my back or take a breather from the monotonous tasks of a hopyard, I often look up at the ridge and think, "I need to get up there". Well, I finally did. With just a backpack, a few granola bars, water, binoculars, camera, and cell phone (its GPS allows me to see my current position on Google maps - very cool) I managed to reach the top in 2.5 hours with plenty of stops. Its amazing what 2000 vertical feet will do to a view! My first impression was: Lillooet looks infinitely more cool from up here. I was also able to get a bird's eye view of our hop farm and scout out where we could put in the next few acres of hops.

Despite the brilliant February sun, it didn't take too long before a chill came over me. So after taking a quick call from my sister and answering a few emails on my new smartphone (just for novelty sake), I headed back down. My descent was expedited with the help of a massive scree slope extending from the ridge top. I tried to imagine the scree was Whistler powder and my boot soles had skis attached to them and slid to its base in a mere 20 minutes. That was fun!

Fighting fire with fire

It's the dead of winter here at the farm but images of blazing wildfires from the previous summer are still fresh in our minds.

Luckily, our farm is situated on the east side of the Fraser River which provided a buffer of safety from the infamous infernos that made Lillooet a household name during the summer of 2009. However, we realized this was a relatively fragile buffer after witnessing charred pieces of woody debris falling from the sky onto our property.

Smoke plumes from the wildfire were ejecting this debris thousands of feet into the sky only to fall back to the earth many kilometres away. If only one still contained embers, it could initiate a new fire wherever it fell.

This got us thinking about how to better protect our property from future blazes. After all, the pine beetle had ravaged most of our ponderosa pines, leaving hundreds dead like giant matchsticks just waiting for a spark.

So in mid-January with a nice layer of snow on the ground, we set forth into the nearby Ponderosa patch with our new favourite farm gadget, the Stihl Farm Hand chainsaw to 'reduce the fuel load'.

The blue stain of the wood is indicative of a pine beetle infestation and is created not by the pine beetle but a fungus carried in its mouth parts. When the beetle bores into the wood, the fungus spreads throughout the tree constricting the flow of water and nutrients which eventually contributes to the death of the plant!

We then set ablaze a number of large piles of debris from the fallen trees. This one was especially impressive!

The resultant ash from these fires will be scattered to other areas of the property to encourage establishment and growth of native deciduous vegetation to attract wildlife and migratory songbirds, in particular. The foliage of showberry, maple, dogwood, and rose provides opportunities to glean for insects as well as cover during breeding and migration.

The Big Freeze & The Big Bad Trellis

Here at Bitterbine Farm/Ranch (we haven't quite figured out which description best describes our 18 acres...) we bring in the New Year with a half-finished trellis for the one-acre hop yard. There has been a Herculean effort by friends and family during the fall to get us to this stage. The majority of their sweat was poured into making the 88 hand-made cedar poles - the cellulose bones of the trellis system.

After getting a much-needed tutorial from our neighbour Hal on the ins-and-outs of working with such massive raw timber, we pulled out or brand new Stihl Farmhand Chainsaw and started cutting the cedar timber to size.

We found it fitting that much or our Lumberjack work occurred during the month of Movember while Tim and I were sporting our magnificent moustaches, which brought in hundreds of dollars for Prostate Cancer research!

Each pole was measured to 21': 18' out of and 3' into the ground. The final product was just the right size for one person to maneuver with only partial back strain. We split the poles to have substantial girth (a few additional inches than what is recommended) to withstand Lillooet's infamous wind gusts that shoot through the Fraser Valley during the hot summer months.

We're also putting our faith in the natural strength of Thuja plicata to flex and not break in the face of gusts exceeding 80 km/hr. We were given a taste of what's to come on the night of November 30th after putting up a dozen poles: Strong winds and torrential rain fell that night, forcing over poles that were only partially back-filled.

With the pole yard count reaching the magic 88, we set our sights on getting them into the ground before freeze-up. With the help of Hal and his hard working Deere, we managed to install the perimeter poles to the yard by the end of Movember. But with forecasts calling for some serious sub-zero nights for the first week of December, we had precious little time to get the rest of the poles in before the ground became like hardened concrete. Turns out Mother Nature gave us one last day - December 1st - to install the remaining 50 interior poles. Good luck, we thought. Nevertheless, we added a powerful skid steer to the equation and managed to push through the encrusted piles of soil to infill about a dozen more poles.

By about 2:30 pm, we looked at our progress and Garrett the skid steer operator said, "Boys, winter will be here in about 20 minutes." He was right, the sun was heading back behind the mountains and a rapid chill could be felt in the air. Although the unfinished trellis was a little disappointing, we figured to just pick-up where we left off come spring time.

In the mean time, let's make some hoppy beer!

Preparing for winter

Despite smashing numerous decades-old temperature records this summer (37.1 C on June 4th, for example) Lillooet's weather continues to surprize with record-setting lows. The blue stalactite-looking spike on October 12th marks a new record low for the area and was a stark reminder of the rapid transition from summer to fall in Lillooet. Less than three weeks ago we were enjoying a +30 C days -- ideal conditions for drying our first harvest of hops (more to come on that topic later this week).
This early cold snap was enough incentive to start moving the potted hop plants indoors for the winter. So we cut the bines and twine from each plant and brought them into our garage where we sandwiched them with layers of peat to maintain steady temperatures and prevent the plants from drying out during the cold, dry winter.



The bines were then separated from the twine, collected and added to the compost pile. While the hops sit dormant over the winter, we will focus on building up a much larger, healthy composting system as our primary source of organic nutrients to the farm.



After a final count of the hop plants, we managed a 89% success rate in propagating rhizomes to their full plant potential. Not surprisingly, the organic Willamette from Left Field Farm faired best with a 99% success rate compared to the other varieties from non-organic sources south of the border. These were treated with a contact fungicide and endured a long transport from south of the border which probably contributed to their lack of vigor. For example, only 56% of Chinooks were successful however those that were propagated produced heaps of hops - thankfully.

It was also a pleasant surprise to see that most Mt. Hood and Cascade plants rebounded from the brink after we fixed the problem in the irrigation lines. At $3.75 per rhizome and countless hours of tending, that could have been a costly error!

The First Harvest and a Recap

Over the course of three weekends, we managed to pick by hand our entire 2009 hop crop with relative ease. Beginning September 5th, we had 5 sets of eager hands picking only the most ripe hops from among our ten varieties. As this was our first harvest, there was much discussion on what a 'ripe' hop cone actually was. The books describe a ripe cone as dry and papery to the touch, light/pale green in colour, and rebounding quickly after compressing the cone. These were all helpful hints but found that the 'dry, papery feel' of the hop was the best indicator for ripeness.



Initially picking into large freezer bags, we noticed condensation on the inside of the bags indicating that the freshly-picked hops were actively releasing moisture and decided to pick into more breathable burlap bags to keep the hops breathing freely.



The first harvest day was bittersweet (the bad sort of bitter) in that 3 of our varieties (Cascade, Mt. Hood, and Willamette) were hit hard following a failure in the irrigation lines. A faulty plug at the end of the line was forced out and overlooked for almost 2 weeks, starving about 300 potted hop plants a single drink of water during one of the hottest periods of the summer. The dried, dead bines were a dreadful sight considering these varieties looked like they were going to produce one hell of a crop just a few weeks earlier. Forced to see the glass as half-full, our other high-alpha varieties flowered a very healthy crop. Chinook, Galena, and Magnum all produced well over one pound of dried product.


All told, almost 10 pounds of dried hop cones resulted from the harvest. A seemingly small amount given the number of plants (750) but when considering their humble beginnings from small rhizome cuttings, we think this has been a resounding success!

Thanks to Tim, Ash, Heather, Kelly, and Sean for helping out with this year's harvest!


Unfortunately, the Bitterbine Blog was sorely neglected over the course of the summer, so I plan to post some retrospective blogs to cover the months of June, July, and August - three very busy months worth documenting. More to come!

Welcome, the training of the bines

Welcome to the Bitterbine Blog! There are are few reasons why I started a blog detailing the progress at the Bitterbine Farm.

First, I hope to keep in touch with my extended family who mainly reside in Ontario. Having a Catholic background you might guess that I am part of a rather large family and it's simply too difficult to reach out over the phone, e-mail, or snail mail on a regular basis. Instead, I thought I would join the world of blogging as an alternative means of keeping in touch.

For those who are interested in actually growing hops yourselves, well then you are in luck! My second goal with this blog is to document our hop-growing project every step of the way. I hope to shed some light on the biology of Humulus lupulus, report on how the varieties fare in the unique climate of Lillooet, British Columbia, talk shop from a farmer's perspective, and generally showcase the herculean growth potential of hops throughout the summer season.

Lastly, The Bitterbine Blog will act as a show-and-tell of sorts. Every week we will have photographs of the hops as they train themselves up a ten-foot trellis, and hopefully lots of pictures of friends and family helping out as farmhands along the way!


THE TRAINING OF THE BINES

Last weekend, co-CFO (Chief Farming Officer) Tim Hazard, my brother Paul, and our amazing neighbour Hal fixed the trellis system of the hop nursery. The week prior, wind gusts in excess of 80 km/h tested the structural integrity of this 10' trellis system, causing the posts to sway widly in all directions despite the guy wires. We decided to make some adjustments to the design by affixing the posts to each other with 1"x4"s to form a more unified structure. We think the changes produced a much stronger system. Special thanks to Hal for his sage advice! We will need to continually monitor the trellis as the hops begin to grow upwards adding hundreds if not thousands of additional pounds of vegetation to the system. We'll keep you 'posted'.


We were also surprised to see our hops taking off in their vertical pursuit for more sun! First out of the gates were the Willamette plants, with bines about 3 feet long by May 22nd. This particular variety originated from Left Fields Farm, the home of the coveted organic Crannog (pronounced with a long, drawn out 'O', NOT Crann-awe-g) Ales Farmhouse Brewery. The other 9 varieties came from a large conventional hop farm in Oregon. We think that the organic upbringing of the Willamette rhizomes is the reason for its early, vigorous growth to date. However, once established at our hopyard, all 10 varieties will soon produce certified organic hops!


At three feet in length, it was definitely time to train the hop bines up their respective climbing routes. We tossed 20' lengths of braided sisal over the horizontal trellis rope and brought a line down to each pot where we wrapped the bines clockwise in an east-west direction. The bines stuck like glue to the sisal with their velcro-like stalks. I'll have to post a macro-shot of the bine stalk to really demonstrate its gripping abilities. It's quite amazing!





Enjoy the blog!