Hops are almost ready

Here's one of my Sterling hop plants. I ordered some Nugget, Cascase and Sterling, two rhizomes each, from Northern Brewer and started them in pots after a few days in the fridge.



They all grew in the pots, but one of the Nugget vines didn't survive transplant into the ground. The other hasn't grown well. The leaves are yellowing and it hasn't produced any flowers or cones. Maybe it'll do better next year.



There are a couple of things I did wrong. One was not to prune enough. When my job at the newspaper went full time, it coincided with my getting a ton of hours at Staples and I hardly saw my vines for weeks. The other mistake was not properly supporting them. I started with a tomato trellis for each type. After a week and a half, the Sterling vines had outgrown its trellis. So I found a long piece of edgework that was eventually supposed to go in my house somewhere. I pushed about a foot of it into the ground and wrapped the vine around it. The vine climbed up that, too, and hung off, and grew back down the vine, then up itself and just got more and more tangled. That diagonal stick you see above is the original piece of wood, weighed down by the weight of the vine and the cones. The green post beside it is a metal vine trellis I picked up at Lowe's. I really underestimated how fast hop vines grow. I'll still get a good yield this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.