@HawksbillHops - General Goin's On

Here's an overall view of the hop yard.

This is the final post from my weekly check-in at the hop yards.  I've got a nice perspective here of the yard from the southwest corner, over by the Cascades.  Sure, the weeds got away from us - we had them under pretty good control until we got all that rain during the last two weeks - but looking through the yard shows that we've got good progress across all varieties, especially considering we're in our first year.

I'm amazed to think that we had our planting event on May 2, and here we are, just two months later, with good prospects for harvest across all of our varieties - Cascade, Chinook, Columbus/CTZ, Fuggles, and Goldings.




We did plant a cover crop of fescue to help control the weeds, and while it's holding its own out there, it's hard to pick out between the pig weed and everything else, lol.  It's also just too late to get out there and try to manually weed.

Here's a look at the buckwheat cover on our empty row.

In another kind of success story, David planted our empty row with buckwheat as a cover crop.  PawPaws honey has about a dozen bee hives out on the farm, and this will make great forage for them.  When I checked it out on Saturday, I saw hundreds of the happy little buzzers working over this crop.

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, my plan is to get two pounds of this honey - which will be a delicious dark variety -  to use in a couple of homebrewed honey porter batches this fall.

That buckwheat honey will combine nicely with the Fuggles crop from Hawksbill Hop Yards to make a unique and tasty farmhouse product!