Beneficial Post-harvest practices in the Hopyard

This grower blog deals only with the post-harvest practices in traditional commercial hopyards and some best practice strategies to control and reduce the percentage of overwintering DM and other pathogens

.  Great Lakes Hops uses these combined practices and has found them to be very effective in the Midwest region hop production.

Control of downy mildew (DM) in the hopyard is an ongoing challenge for growers in many regions; and especially difficult for growers that have susceptible hop varieties.  DM takes different forms and produces several different spore types in reaction to environmental conditions - - i.e. aerial, oospores, and zoospores. Each spore type has its own set of specific control measures. DM is active whenever temperature and moisture conditions are correct; spring, summer, and fall. In the fall season, downy mildew switches from actively producing airborne spores that mainly affect the bines, foliage, and cones; to forming protective oospores and motile zoospores that can overwinter in the soil and dormant hop crown. The more familiar springtime DM spikes on new shoots are less evident in the fall as hop growth slows and the infected older foliage takes on a mottled appearance; which many growers fail to notice. Once DM has a foothold in a hopyard, outside airborne spores are not necessary to re-start early springtime infections.

 Great Lakes Hops has found the following fall practices to be effective in gaining good control over downy mildew and other pests and pathogens in hopyards.

11.)    Do not compost or put harvested bines back into the yard if pathogens were prevalent. Do not spread other hopyards' waste back into your hopyard if you are a processor who handles other grower’s hops.  Properly composted harvest waste must reach a temperature of 130 degree F. to kill pathogens and few growers can accomplish this successfully and instead end up with piles of decayed plant material that continues to be a source of pathogens.

22.)    Change your irrigation frequency post-harvest.  DM motile zoospores require wet saturated soil to persist and move in the soil.  The quickest way to encourage fall DM crown and bud infection is to leave the irrigation controller running daily going into the fall season.  After harvest run the hopyard irrigation on the dry side and only irrigate a couple of times a week; if at all. In most areas, rainfall coupled with cooler temperatures is adequate.

33.)    Limit your fall applications of Nitrogen to 80 pounds per acre or less.(banded) Fall fertilization is about replacing some of the nutrients removed by the hops during the growing season and rebuilding the soil microbe population that the high usage rate of synthetic fertilizers destroy. However, high rates of nitrogen applied to fall hopyards can delay natural dormancy and enhance proliferation of pathogens like downy mildew.  Many grower use organic light manure applications both spring and fall to rebuild the soil. Additional fall applications of potassium, lime, or gypsum has been shown to be beneficial to increasing next season hops vigor.  Weak nutrient-deficient plants are more susceptible to winterkill, diseases and pests.

44.)    Apply fertilizers and manures alongside the rows; NEVER on top of the crowns.  High levels of excess nitrogen near the hop crown coupled with wet soil create an ideal condition for DM and crown rots to proliferate.

55.)    Till the hopyard soil. Simple mechanical soil cultivation each fall improves soil aeration and reduces the wet compacted soil conditions that mildews and pests like nematodes favor. Many spores and nematodes are destroyed by this simple fall practice.  

66.)    Apply systemic fungicides to the hopyard post-harvest.  The idea is to limit fall spore production in infected plant bines and leaves and destroy  pathogens that will overwinter in the hopyard. Systemic applications containing  phosphonic acids will move downward in both the plant and soil; providing protection against  motile zoospores. Tanos or Pristine, combined with Phostrol / Aliette make an effective application for yards that have experienced downy mildew. Usage rates are lower than during the growing season.

77.)    If your hopyard experienced heavy pest and disease pressure during the season, consider a late fall dormant oil spray. Horticultural oils  applications will reduce overwintering insects and mites / their eggs and  many types of fungal spores.

88.)    Trim bines of infected varieties short in late fall after leaf drop and remove the debris from the yard. Wait 4 to 6 weeks after harvest to cut the bines short to allow the carbohydrates in the remaining bines to translocate down into the crowns and help build strong budding at the soil level. The optimum height to cut is about two inches above the new crown buds.  Cutting closer into the crown at this time creates a large open wounds that allows easy access for many types of crown rots. Be sure to cover any  visible crown buds with soil or light mulch before the winter sets in.

99.)    Avoid over-application of heavy wet mulches over the crowns. Covering exposed crown buds with field soil to prevent winterkill of buds is probably a better choice in most larger hopyards.

110.)  Get control of those weeds! Hopyards with lots of weeds have higher levels of mildew infections. Use herbicides like Volunteer for grasses and a contact burn-down like Aim for broadleaf weeds. Organic growers need to cultivate more frequently and can treat weeds with natural products like clove oil. Always destroy weeds before they set seed!

111.)   Remove black plastic or ground fabric used for weed control. Controversial, we know, but . . .  Plastic mulches hold excess continuous moisture and heat under the cover and result in higher levels of disease and root rots.  It is difficult to rebuild the nutrient and microbe depleted soil around the plant and remove underground rhizomes with a permanent plastic mulch or row cover in place. The tradeoff of fewer weeds by using poly row covers in exchange for for lower yields and higher disease levels is not logical in our humble opinion after working with hundreds of hopyards and comparing grower results.

112.)   Dig up your hops!  It is a great idea to dig up a few plants in the yard each fall to inspect the roots and crowns. Are the roots white and healthy in appearance? Any stunting, decay, or lesions?  What is the level of soil compaction? This is a great way to find early signs of many pathogens such as crown rots and nematodes. Then simply replant the crowns when you finish these spot checks. J

Blogged by hop grower Lynn Kemme / Great Lakes Hops-  Fall 2015 

Hop pesticide review – Horticultural mineral oils- Cheap but effective in the hopyard.

Refined horticultural mineral oils go by many names - - dormant oil, summer oil, paraffinic oil, crop oil, stylet oil, white oil, etc.   All oils can be sprayed alone or with other compatible pesticides and have a direct contact mode of action on labelled pests and fungi. Oils direct contact action means very little possible resistance issues compared to many other pesticides. They are an inexpensive, safe, effective, and easy-to-use control for a quick knockdown of pests and pathogens like spidermites and mildew. Applied as a fall dormant spray it eliminates possible overwintering insect and mite eggs and fungal spores and mycelium. (Great as a post-harvest treatment going into late fall.) Crop oils also enhance weed control when combined with several different broadleaf and grass herbicides.  These oils are commonly used in field crops, orchards, and vineyards and should be in every hopyards arsenal of controls. They are considered to be a relatively soft control on beneficial insect populations, but should not be applied during beneficial insects active hours – Example: during bees foraging hours.

Horticultural oils to have a couple of important features that are necessary to understand before purchasing or applying them.  Mineral crop oils are refined with different weights; from very light and thin viscosities to heavier oilier types -  very similar to different grades of automotive oils.  They have the majority of sulfates removed to reduce crop burn potentials; but all have the ability to severely damage hops if used incorrectly.  The general rule of thumb is to select a thinner grade oil the hotter the day temperature is. (light summer oils vs. heavier Avoid application to the cone-bearing portions portion of hop plants and bines; as the oil will damage burrs and turn contacted cones brown. It is recommended to treat the lower non-coning portions of the hops near the ground to control populations of mites and mildews that tend to spread upward as the season progresses.

dormant oils).  Spraying these crop oils should be done during the coolest part of the day or evenings. Morning spraying should be avoided if hot mid-day temperatures are expected to climb above 80 degrees. 

Some manufacturers have obtained both labelling for hops and organic production.  Check the use labels carefully of different oils carefully to determine the proper grade and particulars of each product.

Some manufactures’ of horticultural crop oils are JMS Corporation, the Drexel Chemical Co., and Helena Chemical Corporation.

Blogged by hop grower Lynn Kemme / Great Lakes Hops    Fall 2015

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Overlooked? Compaction & Herbicides in Hop Yards

   

Here are a couple subjects I found that are seldom discussed in articles and forums. I think they can impact your sucess growing hops.

  Poor subsoil conditions.   Have you done a compaction/perk test? Take a shovel or a post hole digger and walk your site.  Dig or auger a series of holes a minimum of 2 feet deep across the site.  Check for orange iron banding in the soil which could indicate a seasonally high water table. Do the holes fill up with water? If they do, you may have to install drain tile or sockpipe. Also, note any "hardpan" - soil layers that are so compacted that roots can't penetrate. (If you have difficulty digging through the soil, imagine a plant trying to put a root down into it.)  Hardpan is really common in agricultural land that has been field-cropped with tractors for many years. Crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans are relatively shallow-rooted and grow fine in the top 10 to 12 inches of soil. Tillage equipment used to grow these crops creates a compaction zone 12 to 18 inches below the soil surface.  Hops can easily root to depths of 3 feet or more. Subsoil compaction can halve your potential yields per acre. If you find these conditions, I highly recommend finding a local farmer who has subsoil tillage equipment capable of going at least 24 to 30 inches deep and going across your site in two directions. Do this before you set up your trellis system and plant.  It is pretty tough to do afterwards.

  Prior herbicide applications to your site. Do you know what chemicals were applied to your site? Has Atrazine, dicamba, 2,4-D or any generic version of these ever been applied? These herbicides are very persistent and slow to break down. Atrazine, in particular, has a half-life of over 25 years. It simply leaches and moves deeper into the soil strata. It takes 3 to 5 years just to leach out of the top 6 inches of topsoil. (Now it is starting to show up in well water.) If you have a site with past applications of these herbicides, you can expect damage to the Hop plants ranging from  slight yield reductions to outright death. The hop plants may start out fine, but when their root system reaches the contaminated zone expect trouble. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do, other than select a new clean site. You can have your subsoil sampled and tested prior to planting, to be certain. A possible visual clue is to check out any trees growing around the perimeter of the site. If they appear sickly with dead branches and distorted or stunted growth be aware their deeper roots are probably picking up the residual herbicides.

In short, it pays to investigate these things before you start . . . 

Thanks for reading and hope this helps your hop growing.

http://www.greatlakeshops.com/

REINHEITSGEBOT!! (Bless you . . .)

 I came across an interesting discussion the other day,  whose topic was -Why are German beers so different from their American counterparts? Short answer : Reinheitsgebot! (sneeze!)

 

  Reinheitsgebot is one of the first and oldest consumer protection laws ever passed. It is usually referred to as the German beer purity law and was first proposed in 1487 (no typo!) and passed into law in the year of our Lord 1516.  It simply stated that it was illegal to put anything except water, barley, and hops into beer. It was updated and amended into the Provisional German Beer Law which allowed the additions of yeast, wheat malt, and sugar cane (but banned unmalted barley).

  Hops were specifically mentioned in Reinheitsgebot not only for adding flavor but also acting as a preservative. Midieval brewers did not have the preservative thing down pat and were killing their fellows by adding stuff like chimney soot, poisonous mushrooms, and various herbs to their brews in an effort to preserve the beer. These additions to brewing are now called "adjuncts". ( I always remember it as "Added JUNK".)  The German purity law basically says that if you add other junk to your brew; you cannot label and sell it as real beer.  These provisions are still adhered to today by many brewers- but not all.

  In America; where bigger, faster, and cheaper are king - the use of adjuncts is the norm.

Large brewers use large amounts of corn and rice (among lots of other things like artificial flavoring, corn syrup, colors ,dyes, juices, extracts, etc.) in an effort to produce the most beer for the lowest cost. They use just enough of the Reinheitsgebot ingredients to flavor their brews without having to re-label it a malt liquor. ( Malt liquors are completely based on the fermentation of corn and rice.)

  So, the next time you tip a Bud or a Coors against an imported German Pilsner, realize you are actually comparing a near malt liquor (flavored to taste like beer) to the real thing. Kinda like comparing a can of Spagettios to real Italian spagetti . . . Which leads to twisted thinking like- If you were born and raised only on spagettios; are they now better than the "real" thing? (Ponder that over a pitcher, or two.) But you do have to respect the big  brewers for being able to pull off a brew that is almost entirely water and still have a 3.5 to 5.5 % alcohol content. Amazing!

  Thank goodness that the craft brewers have re-discovered Reinheitsgebot and its brewing principals.  Brew on!
                 
                             

And now, you too are -    "an informed drinker or an educated drunk."
see more @ http://www.greatlakeshops.com/

Hop plants for sale?

 
  I constantly wonder what drives this craft brewing revival. Is it just a re-discovery by a new generation - " something old is now is something new"? Is it a inner compulsion to create something that you can take pride in - "I made that"? Is it that desire of little boys to get that mad scientist chemistry set - (and being brave enough to drink the resulting concoction)? What ever it is, it is not a bunch of cheap drunks - in fact the level of sophistication amazes me.
  This "trend" seems to be no flash in the pan, and you can quickly see that just by looking at the drop in the big brewers sales numbers. The number of craft brewers is expanding rapidly.  Unfortunately, along with all interest in brewing, a few bad things have popped up along the way and you should be aware of them. One of the biggest IMHO is "hop plants for sale"- the topic of this blog.

  This crazy rush of of what I call brewers frenzy has created a haphazard conglomeration of hop seed, plant, and rhizome resellers via the Internet.  Everybody wants to cash in - but there are no rules or standards, and there are no "Plant Police".  A major issue is that there are hundreds of beer hop cultivers grown, but most are indistinguishable from each other. There are relatively few actual producers of hop rhizomes, fewer yet who grow the hop plants, and very few who certify what they sell; and almost nobody propagates virus indexed stock with proven identities.  This has resulted in a "wild-west" market of hop plant material that has no standards for true identification or disease. (Basically, there are a lot of people out there selling mutts as pedigreed hounds.) 

 

Case in point :

  This season I wanted to compare what we do at Great Lakes Hops with our Inernet- based competitors.   I ordered a similar selection of hop rhizomes from as many places as I could find. The goal was to compare service, quality, and value of purchase. I made 4 purchases from resellers, 3 from grower/ producers in February and waited.  All were prepay, I had no problem with that, but a couple of orders didn't show til late May, and the last one showed up in mid June. What I recieved for the money spent did not impress me. The grower/producer rhizomes were the quickest to arrive and were by far the best quality. The ones associated with the Nation Clean Plant Program were the best. The resellers rhizomes arrived - many were shrivelled, moldy and dry. They looked like they had been stored for a long period, and  some obiviously had been cut in half!  Many of these had no buds showing - resembling little dead sticks. At $4.50 each, they were no deal. The hop plants arrived last -  3" high, single stem plants at $10 dollars each. Pretty expensive, but they had varieties the others did not have. However, all the soil had shaken off the roots and the plants were not looking good.
   I am a professional Horticulturist with 25 years in the plant growing business and  I  receive plant material from literally world-wide.  Many are cuttings of plants with no roots at all when I receive them.  IMHO, if anyone had a good chance of starting these, it should be me.  I planted them out as they came in; putting the Cascades next to Cascades, Fuggle next to Fuggle, Chinook next to Chinook - you get the picture.  The direct producer plant material came up pretty reliably; the resellers rhizomes were weak and only about 3/4ths ever emerged. The little plants pretty much stalled out in the heat of July and stared back at me. But I was okay with that - I just wish they had arrived earlier! But what developed with the rhizomes as the season progressed really suprised me.
  I started noticing differences - One Cascade didn't look like the others, Centennials had dark leaf types and light green leaf types, the Fuggles all grew differently, the Magnum from one place has green stems, and from the other place had red stems, Kent Golding was healthy or sickly. What was going on?  This started out as a simple competitors check, but some thing else was going on. So I decided to plant them out alongside our test plot and compare them to our stock plants as they grew side by side. (I should have taken pictures.)
  I have watched them all summer and have two basic conclusions. Number 1:BEWARE! A lot of these plants are not the varieties they claim to be!  Apparently, somebody out there is just throwing rhizomes in a bag and are calling them whatever, just to get the money.  Number 2: There is a lot of diseased junk out there. Lack of plant vigor and virus expression in the hop leaves was common. Only the rhizomes direct from grower/producers were comparable to our virus indexed stock.
  

   I feel pretty good about what what we do at Great Lakes Hops. I am trying to supply healthy Hop plants that adhere to the National Clean Plant Standards. I encourage you to check out our hop growing at http://www.greatlakeshops.com/ to see for yourself. I am not trying to sell you here, but please consider your source carefully before you purchase hop plants or rhizomes. You can't grow healthy hops and brew a great beer if you start with junk!  Brew on!

Done for the season? Not quite. Time to fertilize!

  Things are winding down to a slower winter pace at Great Lakes Hops. 
 The hops are settling in for the cold. They are setting their crown buds nicely - I checked them the other day. Heavy buds show the promise of a good up coming spring season.
  I plan on insuring a good start to next season by applying a late fall application of fertilizer. This may sound odd - fertilizing a plant that is totally dormant- but it works.

  "Fertilizing hops improves yield and quality by suppying the plant with ample nutrition in advance of demand." 
  I plan on using a fertilizer like 8-5-15  at a rate of about 35 lbs Nitrogen per acre. (I'll apply another 35 lbs. in the spring of 8-5-5.) If the fertilizer numbers are the percent of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and the bags weigh 50 lbs.; then there should be 4 lbs. N, 2.5 lbs. P, and 7.5 lbs. K in each bag.  So I figure I will need roughly 9 bags per acre to get the job done.
  Why did I select 8-5-15?  I don't want the ratio of N too high - just enough to feed the soil microbes. The Phosphorus will basically sit immobile over the winter and hops don't need a lot of it. But it will be in place when I till it in next spring. The Potassium is the important one - it is taken up by the plant and acts like anti-freeze in the plant roots and buds by preventing the formation of ice crystals in the plant's cells.
  The soil microbe activity will be in slow- mo, but they have all winter to break down the fertilizer into compounds the hop plants can use. The snow melt will slowly move the fertilizer deep in the root zone.  When the plants start to stir in spring the nutrients will be there like a prepared buffet.
  So I am going side dress the rows around the end of November - after Turkey Day.

  I have posted a couple of really good guides for growing and fertilizing Hops at http://www.greatlakeshops.com/.  Check them out under "Docs" in the left margin.