Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, Member FDIC.

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/ Director Scott Knudson.

In this first of a two-part series, Grant Goltz, of Rethinking Blackduck Pottery and Birchbark Canoe takes us into his garden to teach us the cultivation of hops.

When we started growing hops, oh, it's about a dozen years ago, we used to do some home brewing, so we decided we'd grow our own hops.

And we started out with just a few, and you can't grow just a few hops because they start to multiply, so now we're up to where we can even supply some of the local small brewers with hops.

Well, this time of the year, it's our busy time of the year.

Usually you can just watch hops grow, but in the spring hops grow up strings.

What we're going to do today is put up strings because when these hops get growing they grow two to three feet a week.

And if we had the strings higher, they'll grow 20 feet up in a couple months before they put on the little cones we'll be harvesting.

But you got to get the strings up before the hops get too long because once they start getting tangled up it's a nightmare.

The few years we've been a little slow and we had to untangle these hops and start them up the strings.

If you get the strings up when they're short, they'll find their own way and start climbing.

Okay.

For strings we use a 4-ply jute twine, and it works really well.

What we gotta do is we lay it out between these two stakes.

This is the length of strings that we need, so I've wrapped this around and then I got to cut them loose at this one end so I can cut the length.

Okay.

So now of course we've got to get these up, you know, 12 feet in the air.

So what I do is I toss them over our cables, I got a big washer that I use for a weight.

So then I'll just take this string and get it ready, and then I'll grab a couple more strings to take with me so I don't have to come back here all the time, make quite so many trips.

I'll tie a little knot in the end so I don't lose track of the center.

Okay, so now I'll go over to the, to my hop row, and we'll put these strings up.

And just keep working their way on down.

Two days ago this thing was only this high and once they get winding up on the strings you can come out in the morning and they might be this high to come back at night they're up to here.

You can't quite watch them grow but sometimes you think you should be able to.

Used to talk about listening to the corn grow.

Okay, next set of strings.

And you can see some of these are not quite as tall.

Here's a tall one coming but they're just getting going.

If you let them grow much more than this it gets kind of, they start tangling up with each other.

Because they want to climb, so they'll twist around anything they can find, sometimes each other.

If there's a weed or a stick sticking up they'll be climbing up that, and then if you haven't got them tied up in time you end up having to untangle them.

A lot of times you'll break some, so it's important to get them up while they're still not too big.

They've got a little, if you feel the stems they feel rough.

They got little prickly things on them.

They'll just like hook into the string.

So once they grab it, they really get going.

Okay, we'll put another stick in for this side of the row.

Untangle our string, and we can tie it up.

And then we'll just continue this process until we've got the whole row tied up.

Now we're going to look at some hops.

These have been strung up for two days now.

They're the same variety that we're just working on.

But here's what I mean.

Look at this one.

See how it's starting to curl around the string?

And now tomorrow that'll be up to here, and by the weekend it'll be about this tall.

If you look on the ground right here, see this tan colored stuff, that's soybean meal.

That's what we fertilize with.

I'll put about three times, first part of May, middle of May, and the first of June.

And when it gets wet, it deteriorates, and the nutrients go into the ground and the hops use that as a nutrient source.

That's our main thing we fertilize with, and it's totally organic so we're not adding chemicals.

This is a another one of our hop beds.

This one gets a little shadier and it starts growing a little three, four days later than what we were just working on, although it's taken off now.

There's two rows of Centennial hops, which is with the purplely stems.

And there's two rows of Cascade hops, which everything is all green, but let me just show you what these do.

I'm going to lift this carpet up and see how these are growing.

From here they're growing all the way across, and I gotta have to take these out because if I don't I'm going to have Centennial hops, these purple ones, growing in with my Cascade.

So I have to go down this row and cut all these out, cut them back to here, and pull all these out.

And any piece of this, you could take a piece like this and plant it and grow more hops.

So, I mean I could start two more hop yards just out of this row, and I do have my newest row of Centennial hops does have some gaps, so I'll be using some of these.

I just take a chunk like this, cut it off, and I'll be putting in, filling in some of those other rows with what I prune out of here.

These hops are distinctive enough so if some of these do grow over here I can recognize them, because when they're coming up now the purple versus the green hops.

Once hops get going they really spread.

But just after I get the strings up this is going to be my next job.

I got to go down and root prune all these ones that are starting to spread.

I didn't do it last year so they're about every other year you got to go in and weed these out.

Yeah, but if you would say abandon this hop bed, they wouldn't die, in about three years it would be solid hops.

There wouldn't be rows anymore.

It would be just one big mass of hops.

If we had the space, and if I was 20 years younger, I would probably put in, I could put in another dozen rows of hops just by multiplying what we've got here.

They're an interesting plant, and they do they're nice looking once they do get big.

I mean they've got leaves this big around.

Give them a couple years.

The first year you plant them they don't do too much, but after they're about three years old they're in full production, if you get them started from good starts like this.

When the brew place first opened in Walker we dug up a bunch of hops and we put in, took them in, and I planted them next to their brewery building.

Unfortunately, when they had the fire and burn that was the end of that so.

But they had hops growing up the outside and it purely was for an educational and decorative.

So I got to put the thinner upright, they're all stacked up over there.

I got to support this cable every so often because once it grows up and gets all the hops on there's hundreds of pounds of weight and these these cables will sag down two feet in the middle if I don't prop them up.

Okay, this upright wasn't tied up good so it fell down, so I stood it back up.

Now I gotta go tie the top up.

So, I just got twine I tie around, wrapping a couple wraps so this can't move and tie it off.

This is soybean meal.

It's actually just ground up soybeans.

It's generally used for livestock feed, but it's real high in protein, which is basically a whole lot of nitrogen and breaks down real easily.

And this is the main thing that we use as a high nitrogen fertilizer which the hops need especially in their early growth stages because they're growing quite rapidly, like they've been growing about three feet a week which uses a lot of nutrients.

The other thing I'm starting I use a liquid fish emulsion fertilizer.

It's a concentrate you mix with water and it's got again nitrogen, but it's got a lot of micronutrients in it.

So this would be the first application this year of this.

This is the second application of this, and I'll put the soybean meal on at least one more time again in about a couple of weeks, then I probably won't put any more.

But I'll probably put about three applications of the liquid stuff because that's real fast acting and it gets the nutrients into the leaves real fast so... About that much does about two rows, and I just broadcast it down the row since we'll be going to the north bed to start out with on this.

Okay, I'll just start on this.

This bucket will do these two rows and it's not rocket science, it's just a matter of spreading a little.

It'll knock off the leaves after a while.

Keep on down this row.

Okay, one thing you'll see down here is that there's two black irrigation lines.

It's the drip irrigation, and even though it's outside and it rains, we're in such sandy soil underneath here that we run that irrigation most of the time actually.

It's water we pump from surface water.

It's not well water so it's fairly warm when it comes up here.

And this, the irrigation water and the rain will break this down, wind blows it, knocks it off the leaves.

Yeah a few strange things growing here.

I don't have a heart to take them out.

We put some peat from some old stuff they took out of the highway when they built it and there's Jack-in-the- pulpit bulbs in it.

See here's a Jack-in - the-pulpit growing in with the hops.

Yeah, that's a big one.

We put a lot of fertilizer and a lot of water in here.

Yeah, they grow and it's not hurting anything there.

It's kind of pretty.

I don't take them out.

Even when I weed things out I leave those.

So just kind of fun to have around.

There's another one growing, another one growing.

All kinds of extra things in here.

I see the Jack-in-the-pulpit's have multiplied.

There's still some up here even.

It started with two or three and now there's about a dozen of them in this row.

Well, when they built the highway they dug out a swamp, oh just a little small one, and they piled all the stuff they dug out of the swamp in what's now our woods up on a hillside and that was 1959.

So there's about a four to five-foot deep layer of old peat that they dug out that's been composting since 1959, and we've, and this used to be a gravel pit right here, and we've added just loads and loads and loads of that old decomposed composted peat on here, and so it's made it into some pretty good rich soil.

So that's been the main thing we've added to our garden.

There's not a lot of insects that bother hops.

There's a few caterpillars that get on them and they don't eat that much, so I don't worry about them.

And usually by mid-summer there's a bird nest or two in the hops.

The little warblers and stuff like to make their nests in these when these get real thick which would be not very long from now.

So in this bed we've got four rows.

There's two varieties.

There's two rows of a variety called Centennial, and there's two rows of a variety called Cascade.

This happens to be the Centennial row these two rows, and when you look at these notice how the stems on the leaves are purple on top and the leaves tend to be fairly deeply cut.

Now the next row is Cascade hops.

Now here's the Cascade hop.

So see there's no purple.

The leaf stems are green, and if you notice the cleft in the leaf doesn't go nearly as deep.

On the Centennial there's deep clefts and on the Cascade it's shallow.

And these are more broader looking so if one of these grows into this row underneath the carpet it's real easy to recognize, and I can either just pull it out or move it back where it belongs.

And they're different flavor and aroma of these two different hops.

Well these two are some of the older varieties.

Nowadays they have, oh they've bred a whole lot of new varieties, they've crossed different varieties, so they got all these exotic new hops.

Centennial and Cascade are some of the older hop varieties.

Cascade, probably up until some of the new fancy hops, was the most widely grown hop in North America and it kind of has what they call a grapefruit aroma and flavor to the hops that's kind of citrusy.

Centennial is similar but it has a little bit of a piney overtone with the grapefruity overtone, and it has a lot more, it has about double the amount of bittering compounds.

So to make the hoppier tasting beer, this is about twice the strength of this, but this has a more subtle, more pure grapefruity flavor and aroma on the Cascade.

So see the leaves are getting pretty big; they're almost as big as your hand.

But now with this warm weather and the new fertilizer on them the leaves they'll start getting bigger leaves.

They'll get leaves this big around on there and they're getting a little bit light green though, which tells me they're ready for more nutrients so.

And then by the end of the week these will have turned dark green just from the soybean meal and I'm going to put the fish emulsion fertilizer on here and they'll green right up and probably start growing faster even.

So they're about eight feet high now, and they were about a foot high three weeks ago, so.

And some of them are growing faster, yeah, and in another week or two most of these will be all the way up to that cable.

Initially they'll try to keep growing, and they'll be sticking up and they'll realize there's nothing more to climb on, so they'll get heavy enough and bend over and then they'll start running back and forth up and down that cable, and you'll look on up at that cable and it'll be thicker than this stuff on the ground.

This is June 1st, and everything seemed to be ahead of schedule this year and we had a lot of warm weather.

Normally I don't think they're this tall quite yet.

They just grew crazy the last few weeks.

Because right now they're just a few individual ones coming up that haven't filled out, but see they're getting little leaves and those will fill out and there'll be more individual ones coming up.

See here's the end of something coming and there's some more starting up, so there'll be probably a half a dozen vines going up each one of these strings.

Right here there's only two right now but there will be two, three, four more coming along behind.

So it gets really thick.

You see here's a string that doesn't have anything climbing it yet.

There's some that might start pretty soon but here's one that kind of wandered off into the between the rows, so I just pick that one up and they always go clockwise around the string, so I'll just give this a few clockwise wraps and get it going.

So now we got one growing on this and there'll be some others following behind.

So I do that where there's nothing going up this string, too.

So I'll probably find one of these one of these days and get it going on there.

Okay, here's some organic fish-based fertilizer.

Shake it up, see if anything settled in the bottom.

It's a concentrate.

So I put some in a big watering can and they say put one ounce per gallon.

I just kind of make an estimate here.

This is a two gallon watering can.

I just need to fill it with water, and then I use one can on each row.

Okay, we'll put this down the row.

I kind of got it figured out how fast I have to move to get this to come out pretty even by the end of the row.

And just pour it down on here.

There we are.

And so it's good to grow for a while.

Thanks so much for watching.

Join us again for part two on Common Ground.

If you have an idea for Common Ground in north central Minnesota, email us at legacy@lptv.org or call 218-333-3014.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the Community, Member FDIC.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

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