Friday, February 20, 2009

Trying to shake off winter

Yet another cold winter weekend, but planning has started for this season.

We will plant out the 4 front circles, giving up on the Sterling in #1 . This will be replaced with another variety or used for our experimental hop varieties- Glacier, Horizon and Santiam. Was hoping for Northern Brewer, as one of the suppliers had them on their website , but they emailed back to say it was a mistake.

Chinooks will be extended and we will get that damn last pole up this year....

Feeding has already started with an application of general fertiliser and I also found an interesting tidbit about the anti fungal properties of Corn meal, thus will spread a bag of corn meal over the planting area this weekend. It has been found that any field rotated after Corn had almost no fungal issues with the following crops.

We will start out working on the afternoon of March 21st, planting preparation and general cleaning up and mulching again.

We will also establish an irrigation system this year making all that manual watering a lot easier.

During clean up last year I found a few large nodes on the Goldings old growth that we cut off and decided to cut these off and put them in wet papertowel and into a baggie in the fridge. Found them this last week and they are growing, so planted them out in the greenhouse , all 4 had great looking sprouts and shoots. The other rhizomes that were in the Greenhouse left over from last are looking good with a few new shoots already up and showing.

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