While Midwest corn and soybean farmers waited for April’s muddy fields to dry for planting, southwest Idaho hop growers were already helping their crop reach for the sun. Corn and soybeans grow from tiny seeds each spring. Hop plants get a jump on the season by resprouting from sturdy roots.
As the first lobed and toothed leaves appear, sticky hairs on the stems attach to anything they can find to stretch toward the sky. Commercial hop growers in the Greenleaf-Wilder area of Idaho provide trellises and twine nearly 20 feet tall.
This is one of only
four places in the U.S. where the crop is grown commercially. You might be tempted to call these champion climbers, “vines,” but botanists call them “bines.” Vines grip with curling tendrils; bines use stiff hairs.
This April, workers at Jackson Hop Farm rode across the hop yards while standing on a platform a dozen feet above the ground. A tractor pulled the contraption perpendicular to overhead wires that stretch among sturdy posts. As the tractor passed under a wire, five men on the platform each picked up a 20-foot long piece of twine from a supply hanging over the partition in front of him. Then five thickly-gloved hands executed a flip and a twist with a tuck and the end of the twine was tied to the wire.
Occasionally, one of the men missed his dally. A shout from the platform would stop the tractor and back it up for another loop.
The platform cowboys weren’t the only ones wrangling hops. A ground team flowed in the wake of the tractor and tacked the other end of the twine to the ground.
As a left hand caught a swaying twine, a right hand aimed a driver loaded with an M-shaped metal clip.
Catch-point-set-step-push and another family of glossy new leaves had a home to grow on.
(This is a brand new hop yard, established just this past winter. Red straws marked the spot where each cluster of roots was to be buried.)
The crew will be back during May to teach the bines to climb, clockwise, to the top of the trellis. Hop plants only make right turns and always follow the clock.
By mid-June the plants will be nearing the tops of the trellises.
At harvest, long hallways of broad green leaves will be festooned with lighter green cones oozing with hoppy goodness.
I
wrote about the fragrant harvest in the Fall issue of
Edible Idaho.
