First Guyed Trellis Poles

On Saturday I drove over to Hawksbill Hop Yards to check in on how the construction of our trellis was going.  Earlier last week, David and Eric, both in the first photo here, had set the poles up.  Now the work moves on to getting the cables strung to support the hops when they start growing.

We've used some guidelines we found on the University of Vermont web site for a lot of our design and concepts, with some insight drawn from the hops conference I went to in March and through networking with the other Virginia growers.  So we chose 5/16" steel cable for much of the support, and the first step in the installation is to get these poles on the outside of the trellis matrix set with guy wires.

The corner ones will have two wires, one on the north-south axis and one on the east-west axis.  The middle poles, such as the one shown here, will only have one wire on either the north-south or east-west.  

They had a great weather day for this work and managed to set all the anchors.  It was something of a learning process for the cabling part, but with two down, we're on our way to getting the whole shebang strung!