Hey man, what you growing?

Here are my hops. Thank you honey for taking the pictures. The vine clippings that I planted are not doing anything, which is good. If this works, I think I use our light bench and grown some more rhizomes over the winter. Next year I'll construct some larger poles since even in most of the hop gardening that I have read, the poles are about 15ft.

Also, after poking around Amazon, there's a book I saw, that I'll probably buy, all about home brew gardening. That should be fun for next year. This year, we're sticking with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley and chives.

After a bit

I think I sense two seasons approaching and how I will treat this blog. I think it's quite obvious that baking in the Summer time is just, well...dumb. Why would you want to turn on the oven anyway? So, in the Summer a young-old man's fancy turns to brewing (and gardening.)

I am tending to my hops in the back, pictures to come either tomorrow or Thursday. They are turning out wonderfully. They have grown tall and I've started to trim them back so that they will grow more bushy. There's already little buds on them.

Andi turned to me today and indicated that she was ready to give up on the Silverlace. That would be the piss poor excuse for a vine on the West side of our house. The vine is all on one side of the trellis, and the leaves are small and not pretty. To my glee she "told" me to order some hops. After all, they get really big leaves, grow bushy and do smell nice when blooming.

To my horror, I've discovered a world wide hop shortage. Not sure on what the deal with that is, so I think some more research is necessary. I then though to myself, "can I reclaim the rhizomes I have now?" I started to do some research and found little. But then, I did call my favorite gardener (Nana-M) and asked her what I could do? As I found the answer, she told me to try and root it from a cutting.

I had just trimmed a bunch of vines, so I cleared off the leaves, and buried the vine in a nice pot of fresh potting soil. If we're lucky I'll have a duplicate of my Hallertauer. This also brings up a bit of a problem for me. I have three types of hops, but I only know one of them, since the label disintegrated. I know which is the Hallertauer, but the Kent Golding and the Cascade are kind of a mystery. I found a website that has pictures of the cones, and it looks like there is a difference in the kinds that once ripe, I should be able to tell. Go to the bottem http://www.brewjobs.net/beer/hops-gardening.html

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I got a kit and brewed it up on Monday. This is amber from Northern Brewer, in fact a Phat Tyre Amber. I'm going to come up with a name for myself, so we'll see.