Hop Trellis Build

So I've gotten the first half of the hop trellises (trelli?) built and up.  Here was the process:

Built the T's out of 4"x4"x8' pressure treated posts, with a 4' section attached to the top with two L brackets, and two T brackets. 

Painted them with outdoor paint to make them look a little nicer, and to make them a bit more weather resistant.

Dug the two holes - about 12" diameter, and about 26" deep.  Used a 30" plastic post sleeve that the post will slide into, and will be 4" above grade.  Helps prevent water from rotting the post, and also can remove the post without digging up the concrete footer.

Put a inch or two of drainage stone at the bottom of the holes. Used a 50 pound bag of concrete in each hole.

Set the post sleeve level and poured the concrete and let set overnight.

Backfilled with soil the rest of the way

Wasn't so easy to slide the posts in.  I had to stand on a ladder and hammer in with a sledgehammer.  So much for the theory that I could slide these posts out in the wintertime.  Oh well.

Strung up the jute twine from the eyelets in the planter boxes through the eyelets on top of the T.  Right now the excess twine is coiled on a rope cleat I screwed into the side of the T.  But I will be building a second higher post to run the rest of the line up too.  Hops need a natural line to grow on, so that the plant can grip it as it climbs, hence the jute twine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jute

Minimal training needed. Just wrapped the bine around clockwise twice, and it did it's own thing from there.

Homebrew Yeast "Washing"

With this last batch of homebrew, I decided to experiment with harvesting and washing the yeast for re-use in future batches.  The yeast I had used for the Porter was a standard English Ale yeast that could be used for a fairly wide array of beers in the future.  When a beer is finished primary fermentation, the yeast have eaten all of the sugars in the wort that they can (to make alcohol and CO2), and have dropped out of suspension in the beer.  The amount dropped out is dependant on how flocculent the yeast strain is. More info: http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_clarification.cfm

A few days before I was ready to bottle the Porter, I boiled 3 mason jars (two quart jars and one big 2-quart jar) to sanitize them and capped them full of the boiled sanitized water.  Put them in the fridge until needed.  

After racking the beer out of the fermenting carboy and into the bottling bucket, what is left on the bottom of the carboy is a thick layer of sludge-like sediment called trub, consisting of inactive yeast, proteins, and hop particles leftover from the brewing process.   So I need to seperate out the yeast to save, called "washing", by removing the stuff I don't want.

Poured the santized water from the 2-quart mason jar into the carboy, swirled around, and poured into the jar.  Put back in the fridge.  After a couple of days, it seperated into 3 layers that looked like this:

The top brown layer is beer liquid, the creamy middle is the yeast, and the bottom darker layer is the trub sediment I don't want.   So I drained off the beer liquid, and poured the creamy yeast layer into one of the smaller jar with about half of the sanitized water.  Shook it up, so it starts looking like this:

 Again, after a few days in the fridge, it again seperates into 3 layers:

 Pour the yeast layer into the 3rd jar, which again after a few days in the fridge, I have refined the yeast layer down to the small amount here:

So I will store this in the fridge until I want to use this yeast again, which will just require making a yeast starter to wake the yeast back up before brewing.

Strawberries and Slugs

We had some slugs going after our lettuce (the iceberg and romaine) in the vegetable beds, and in the flower beds, the hostas.  Little holes in the leaves.  So I set up beer traps, basically the bottom half of a soda can burried in the ground, with some beer in it.  They come out at night, and so the next day, filled with dead slugs.  What a way to go out, drowned in beer.

Luckily, no slugs on our strawberry patch, which is going bonkers.  We've got bird netting over the area this year, so hopefully they won't all disapear the day they get ripe. A few are ready to eat!

Spring Flowers

Some of the earlier bloomers:

Raised Beds

We've completed the expansion of the vegetable garden from last year's two 4'x8' raised beds, to eight.  Built the raised beds from prefabbed corners and un-treated 2"x6" boards.   We filled with a couple of truckloads of  topsoil from the local garden center, along with some compost.   In between the beds, we laid down anti-growth fabric and stone, to avoid having to cut and trim grass between the beds.  You'll also see in the picture that we've constructed a frame of PVC pipe on the one bed, so we can drape bird netting over our tomato plants, and still maintain easy access. 

Rain Rain Rain

This weekend we got a lot of rain.  2.5 inches worth! We needed it badly, as according to the newspaper, even after all this we are still behind the average rainfall total for the year.

Nugget plant #2 (not the one shown in the last post) has concentrated all it's energy into a single bine, and is going crazy, over a foot tall.

Start of Hop Growing

The four hop rhizomes arrived a few weeks ago (2 Cascade and 2 Nugget).  I built four 2'x2' raised boxes for them.  The boxes were filled with half topsoil, half compost/manure.  Plus since hops are supposed to like well drained soil, I split a 40lb bag of sand between the boxes as well.  Once the rhizomes were planted 2 inches deep, the soil was mulched with some straw.

 

 After about 2 weeks or so in the ground, all four have broke ground, all with multiple bine shoots. This is the one Nugget, which is the furthest along.

Materials for the two part trellises have been bought, and are currently under construction.  Digging of the holes as well.  Once the trellises are up, more pics will follow!