In the last homebrew article, Getting Ready to Grow Your Own Hops, I explained the process of choosing a location to grow your hops, select your hops, and purchase the rhizomes for planting. Now I’ll walk you through the steps of planting and maintaining your new hops so plan to get dirty! (I apologize this article is appearing so late in the growing season. Hops should have been planted already to achieve maximum growth although they can still be planted now if you’d like.)
Before you dig your hands into the dirt you’ll need a few things to make the process go faster so I’ve created a nice easy checklist.
-Plant food with nitrogen (I used 1 lb. for each plant of Espoma Organic Traditions All Natural Organic Garden Manure)
-Chicken wire for fencing, preferably plastic or rubber coated not bare metal (minimize rust). 48 inches by 12 inches per rhizome/plant, I’ll explain this later on.
-A large spool of twine or string for the hops bines (commonly called vines) to grow on. (Last year I used a 300 foot spool which was more than enough. This year I used something a little less archaic than messy twine.)
-Plastic or rubber coated metal screw hooks (I screwed them right into the side of the house. If you don’t want to do it that way, you may want to look into building a tall trellis.)
The plant food/manure/compost will go inside the hole below the rhizome to feed it while it grows. I used the Espoma Organic Traditions in the hole and later on put Scott’s Bone Meal around the plants on the surface. You’ll want to keep nitrogen in the ground for the growth of the hops which is one of the main reasons for the compost.
If you’ve got nice soil you won’t really have to worry about tilling it. I just “tilled” 
with a shovel in the areas I was planting in. Dig each hole about 12 inches down and 8 to 10 feet wide. If you’re planting multiple hops dig holes of the same variety 3 feet apart. If the plants are different dig the holes 5 feet apart. This is so that the plants don’t grow together. Pile in some of the compost or plant food, about an inch or two will be fine.
Fill the rest of the hole back in with soil leaving about two inches of room from the surface. This is where you’ll plant the rhizome. Make sure that any rootlets coming off the rhizome are facing downwards.
Fill the hole back in with soil and lightly tamp it down then finish by covering the top with a light hand of mulch. Now you’ve got your rhizome planted. Mark it’s location with a plant marker or small stake. Try not to actually mark the rhizome though. Water the spot but take care not to create standing water. If drainage is a concern the rhizome can be raised up higher and planted in a little hill.
Now that you’ve got your rhizomes planted in the ground (hopefully you marked where they are) I’m going to explain what you’ll be doing with the chicken wire.
Hops are perennials which means once you plan them they come back year after year. In the spring when they start to grow, animals like rabbits like to eat the young shoots, so this chicken wire will be used to make small circular fences around your precious hops.
If this isn’t a worry for you, you can skip this step, however with the way I set up my twine for the hops to grow on, the fences are an absolutely necessary integration.
With that said, take your spool of chicken wire and cut it into 48″ by 12-15″ strips. If you cut close to the far edge it’ll leave individual piece of wire sticking out (careful, they’ll be sharp). You can use these as fasteners to hold the ends together. Bend all of them to create little hooks but don’t clasp them together yet. Curl the chicken wire so it creates a circle. Join the two sides using the bent ends and clasp them all the way down. Now you’ve got s small little fence to keep critters from eating the young shoots as they emerge from the ground. Take these fences and place them on the ground so that your marked hop is directly in the center. I buried the fence to keep it stable for reasons that will be come clearer later. To do this I turned it in a circular pattern back and fourth to create a groove in the soil. Once that groove was created I removed the chicken wire and dug a circle trench for about an inch of the chicken wire to drop in to. Place the fence in this trench and fill it back in so that the fence is buried and stable in the ground. Now you’ve got your hops planted and a fence to protect them.
The last step is to string up the twine for the hop bines to grow on, and grow they will! The height that they’ll be able to grow depends on your own situation so I’ll just describe how I managed my hops. I picked a height based on how much I thought they’d grow from what I read. No matter what you think, they’ll grow taller than you guesstimate. I found that out the hard way and extended my twine twice last year. I didn’t make the same mistake again this year. I put hooks about 22 feet up on the side of the house (which is still going to be short, but necessary for me this year). I looped and tied one side of the string to the right side of the small fence and climbed the ladder with the spool. At the top I looped the string around the hook a few times and dropped the spool to the other side. At the bottom I looped and tied it to the left side of the fence repeating the process with each plant making sure they’re nice and tight.
This will provide enough for the hops to climb on. The hop bines, commonly called vines
, have tiny little hooks that grow from the stem and allow it to attach itself to objects as it climbs. As the hop bines begin to grow they will need to be trained to grow up the string or twine. It’s easily accomplished by wrapping them loosely in a clockwise pattern (looking down on the hops) once they are long enough to do so. It may take a week or so until they fully behave in this manner, but they’ll follow the sun across the sky and curl themselves up the twine on their own.
Now all that’s left to do is constantly water the hops to keep them healthy. My first year I watered my hops twice daily, once in the morning and once after work. Remember though that watering plants in sunlight shouldn’t be done as the water intensifies the sun’s rays and damages the plant. Instead, make sure to pour the water at the base of the plant avoiding saturating the greenery of the plant itself and make sure not to have standing water.
The only other thing to watch out for during the growth of hops is something I encountered during my first year; non-human hop-heads. 
In areas that hops typically don’t grow you’ll be less likely to encounter pests like spider mites, Japanese beetles, and aphids. These bugs like to feed on the leaves of the hop bines. This will be clear if you start to notice holes in the leaves or chewed edges of the leaves. Since we’ll be brewing with the hop cones (once they’re produced) we’ll want to use low-toxicity measures of dealing with the pests. I took care of my problem by buying a house-hold spray bottle which I filled with a mild dilution of insecticidal soap and sprayed all over my hops. This should cover the leaves on top and bottom to rid the pests. Just keep an eye on them from there out.
I’ll continue this article after the summer solstice when the hop plants switch their energy from growing and establishing the plant and foliage to producing the actual hop cones, which are actual flowers, that we’ll eventually be using for brewing!
Hoppy planting, and as always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at andy@beerfm.com or research further in the areas I listed in the last homebrewing article Getting Ready to Grown Your Own Hops regarding hop growing!
-Andy
