Growing Hop In Your Garden
Growing Hop In Your Garden
To range the Hop amongst Vegetables may appear odd; but, it is a garden plant in America, and does give you, if you like to have it, a very good dish for the table. It is wanted to produce its fruit for the making of yeast, or beer, or both; and, to get good hops, there should be some cultivation.
Any bit of a root will grow and become a plant. The young plants should be planted in the fall, three or four together in a clump, or hill, and the hills should be from seven to ten feet apart.
The first year of planting, put four rods, or little poles, to each hill, and let two vines go up each pole, treading the rest of the vines down to creep about the ground. In a month after the vines begin to mount the poles, cut off all the
creeping vines; and draw up a hill of earth against the poles all round, and cover all the crowns of the plants.
In short, make a hill a foot high with a flattish top, and then fork up the ground between the hills and break it fine. When weeds begin to appear, hoe the ground clean; and, at the end of another month draw some more earth up, and make the hill bigger and higher.
When the fall comes, cut off the vines that have gone up the pole a foot from the ground; take down the poles; dig down the hills, and, with a corn hoe, open the ground all round the crowns of the plants; and, before winter sets in, cut all close down to the very crowns, and then cover the crowns over with earth three or four inches thick.
Through this earth the hop shoots will start in the spring. You will want but eight of them to go up your four poles; and the rest, when three inches long, you may cut, and eat as asparagus; cook them in the same manner, and you will find them a very delightful vegetable.
This year you put poles 20 feet long to your hops. Proceed the same as before, only make the hills larger; and this year you will have plenty of hops to gather for use.
The next, and every succeeding year, you may put poles 40 or 50 feet long; but they must not be too large at bottom. Be sure to open the ground every fall, and to cut all off close down to the crown of the plants, which, when pared off with a sharp knife, will look like a piec
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e of cork.
In England, where there are more hops used than in all the rest of the world, it requires four or five years to bring a hop hill to perfection. Even then, a pole from 15 to 20 feet long is generally long enough; and the crop of thirty hills is, upon an average, not more than equal to that of one hill in the hop plantations on the Susquehannah; notwithstanding that, on the Susquehannah, they merely plough the ground in spring; never open the crowns and pare them down, leave the loose creeping vines together with the weeds and grass to be eaten, in summer, by sheep, which also eat the leaves of the mounting vines as far as they, by putting their fore feet against the poles, can reach up; and yet, in England, the Hop lands are called hop gardens, and are cultivated and kept in a garden state.
But, hops are to be preserved. They are fit to gather, when you see, upon opening the leaves of the hop, a good deal of yellow dust, and when the seeds, which you will find at the sockets of the leaves of the hop, begin to be plump. Gather them nicely, and let no leaves or stalks be amongst them; and lay them out on a cloth to dry in the sun, taking care that no rain fall upon them, and that they be not out in the dew.
When perfectly dry, put them, very hardly and closely pressed, into a new bag, made of thick Russia linen, such as they make strong trowsers of. And, in this state, they will, if necessary, keep good and fit for use (if kept in a dry place) for twenty years, or, perhaps, three times twenty. I have used hops, for brewing, at ten years old, and found them just as efficient as new hops of the same original quality.
However, people say that the fresh hops have a more lively flavor; and, as any stick will, in America, carry enough to supply a family with hops for the making of yeast cakes, it must be shocking laziness not to put a few by every year.
By: Janice Sherwood
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