Now we're hopping

In 2007, we planted four varieties of hops along the silo, in the hoppes the silo would make a good trellis. We even made twine runners up and hoisted them up with a rope. That didn't work so good, because we found that the hops ripened at different times, but were all connected at the top by the one rope, so they all had to be harvested at once.

Not this year. A joint design effort produced the device below, which hangs on the rim of the silo and allows us to lower the vines for each plant from inside the silo. After building two of four and putting them in place, it looks like it will work great. In the two days between building them and photographing them, the vines had already grabbed the twine and started their clockwise spiral up. One (the Columbia) even has a vine 12 feet tall already.