Home Grown Hops Advice needed

[gibbocore]

Hey greenthunbs,

I'm moving house and fortunatley my cascade vine has started to die off. I plan on taking the rhizome with me and am curious of how to go about it, do i simply cut it off at the base and dig up the rhizome and replant it?

[SUBREW]

Should be the perfect time of year.

I moved a few years back at this time of year (in NZ) and yes you can just cut the vines back and dig up the rhizomes.

I found I could actually dig out the main plant and also divide off a few new plants that had rooted arround it, so in the end I potted up 3-4 plants and then left them a few months and replanted in the new locations!. I did find the main plat had a deep 'tap' root so try and dig down and get as much of that as you can and have a big pot ready!

Hops are pretty hardy by the looks of things and all the new plants took well when I replanted them... in fact they spread all the time and root where-ever the vines touch the ground and can become a bit of a weed if you let them get out of hand!

Hope this helps

Cheers

SUBREW.

[gibbocore]

awesome, cheers mate!

[Trough Lolly]

Gibbocore - how big is the plant? You may want to consider moving the plant and cutting up the root stock to make several plants, as well as moving it. I've just finished planting a number of hop plants that were in half wine barrels - they were root bound to buggery and I cut away a lot of root stock but managed to get at least 6 good rhizomes from each plant and so now I have 6 Chinooks and 6 Goldings from two hop plants.

I use the wheelbarrow to move the root balls and wash them with a weak Seasol solution to reduce stress on the roots. Cut with a sharp knife / secateurs or scissors and plant them in soil that's well fed with some manure. You'd have to try hard to kill hop rhizomes! The only drawback to this method is that when you divvy up a decent hop plant you will most likely forfeit any hops this time around but the next year should yield a decent crop of fresh hop flowers. Oh, and as for root balls, I've found that most of the hop varieties tend to spread their roots out laterally rather than vertically so you shouldn't have to dig too deep to get the root ball out...

Cheers,
TL

[gibbocore]

Hey mate, it ended up being about a half a kilo rhizome after i cut away some of the longer roots that had grown into some nearby brickwork. Its still pretty massive with some of the roots about an inch thick. I'm amazed at how much it has grown in one season, considering it was tiny when i got it.

[Trough Lolly]

Given the right conditions, hops can grow like triffids! I saw some online time lapse photography of one growing and it's almost scary what happens above ground, let alone at the root ball!!

Cheers,
TL