Hop Garden - End of Season

After the last harvest, I left the plants to soak up as much sun as possible. Here in Oklahoma, the nights have started getting down to the low 50s so I decided it was time to trim back the plants and get ready for winter. I decided to experiment a bit to see if I could propagate some rhizomes for planting/exchange next spring. I decided to try 2 things, leave some bines connected to the crown and bury them, and trim some completely from the plant and bury them in a trench. I was told the latter wouldn't work, but hey it was worth a shot.

To start, I stripped all of the plants of foliage from the top, leaving the lower bines connected to the crown. The picture on the left is one of the centennial plants stripped. For the bines left connected to the crown, I created a coil around the main stem coming out of the ground (right). That coil was then covered with fresh dirt (lower left). I'm hoping that this will allow these bines to continue to be supported by the crown, but start to grow some rootlets.

The picture lower right is of the centennial bines I buried in a trench at the back of my hop garden. I just took some long bine sections from the lower part of the plant, dug a trench a few inches deep and then placed the bines in there. In the spring, I'll dig up the trench and see if the bines are still alive or whether they have died. Either way, I will not have lost anything!

Within the next few weeks, I'll be covering the entire hop garden in a blanket of leaves raked from the yard. These will help to provide a blanket over the winter and will be easy to remove in the spring. After harvesting rhizomes in the spring, I will put down a more permanent mulch.