Get on your IPM scouting hats — the forecasted weather over the next few days is prime for outbreaks of downy mildew! So, be sure scout your hops plants and be prepared to treat them. For a reminder of downy mildew ID and management, visit our factsheet: http://www.uvm.edu/extension/cropsoil/wp-content/uploads/DownyMildew.pdf

For those of you who missed the Northeast Hop Alliance bulk rhizome purchase, there are still a few options available.  Our website maintains a list of sources from where you can purchase hop rhizomes.  Here is a run down of some of the local places:

Aroostook Hops, Westfield, ME has Nugget rhizomes for sale.  Check out their website for pricing and availability.

Atlantic Hops still has some rhizomes available, call (917-868-6480) or email Mike for varieties and pricing.

Northeast Hop Alliance and Cornell Cooperative Extension - Live hop plants.  Cascade, Fuggle, Liberty, Newport, Perle, and Willamette are being sold in 4-inch pots, and can be purchased for $5/plant, with a minimum of 30 plants/single variety.  These plants are propagated from cuttings of virus-free stock purchased from the Washington State Clean Plant program. Live plant cuttings such as these are free of latent hop viruses and mildews.  This is the best way to guarantee that you will start your hopyard with disease-free stock.

South Royalton Market, South Royalton, VT - Contact Scott for pricing and available varieties.

Sunnybrook Farm, Middlesex, VT -  VOF certified organic hop rhizomes.  Cascade, Centennial, Willamette, Kent Golding, Mt. Hood, and Magnum available for $4\each (plus shipping).  Email Sunnybrook Farm, or call 802-310-6031.

Do you have rhizomes that you have harvested from your hopyard that you are interested in selling?  Please feel free to post on the  Vermont Hops Google Group (the group is not limited to Vermonters) or email me, and I’ll post it here.

Registration is now open for the 2012 UVM Extension Winter Hops Conference! The event will take place on March 19, 2012 at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington, VT. For complete details, you can download the Winter Hops Conference flyer here.

We are very excited to announce that the 2012 UVM Extension Winter Hops Conference will take place on Monday, March 19th at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington, VT.  Please save the date!  We have some great speakers lined up, click on link for more details.

Hi All,

The Northeast Hop Alliance is preparing to place their Cooperative Purchasing order for both rhizomes and coir.  If you did not reply to the Cooperative Purchasing survey, posted here in December, you may still place an order.  If you did reply to the survey, that DOES NOT mean that you have placed an order.  You can download the .pdf order form here, or the .docx version here.

Orders are due January 24, but it is preferred that you place your orders by January 20th.  The rhizome quotes are very reasonable at $1.50/rhizome, with a 10% discount if you pay in full when you order (so $1.35/rhizome).  Varieties available can be found on the order forms above.  Coir orders must be paid in full at the time of ordering.  W-Clips and Clip Applicators are also available through NeHA via Foothill Farms.  Contact information is available on the order forms.

Also of note, Steve Miller, the New York State Hops Educator, has virus-free live plants available at $5.00 each, with a minimum order of 30 plants per variety, available in increments of 30.  The available varieties are Fuggle, Cascade, Newport, Liberty, Willamette and Perle.  Virus free hop cuttings ensure that you plant your hopyard with stock which is free of diseases such as downy and powdery mildew and hop latent virus.  For more information, contact him by email.

If you miss the NeHA deadlines, Atlantic Hops is still offering rhizomes at a very competitive rate, and they have extended their ordering deadline to February 1st.

Now is also the time to be thinking about placing orders for your hopyard poles.  Cedar and larch/tamarack are harvested when the ground is frozen, so talk to your logger soon!  Steve Miller, the New York State Hops Educator has assembled this list of contacts.  As he says, this is not an exhaustive list, nor is it an assurance of quality.

Just one of our freezers, packed full of aromatic leafy green goodness.

I know it might not seem like it now, but time has a way of flying by, and the next thing you know, it will be hop harvesting season!  If all things go as planned, your freezer will look akin to ours.

Hops, while light and fluffy, do occupy a lot of space.  That’s why we partnered with the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences to design a small-scale hops baler.  Seniors in the Electrical Engineering (EE) and Mechanical Engineering (ME) Programs in the School of Engineering at UVM take a year-long “capstone” course that challenges students to design and fabricate solutions to  multidisciplinary problems. This unusual course is critical to preparation for the students’ post-academic world: it moves them from  textbook assignments to project-driven activities typically experienced by an employed engineer; and it requires that they collaborate across typical academic boundaries and interact with working engineers.

SEED (Senior Experience in Engineering Design) is a products and systems design course. Projects originate as statements of need from regional companies, start-ups, individuals, state agencies and consumer groups, as well as faculty research groups. They are conducted by teams of students, typically three to five, with the direct, continuous involvement of our faculty as well as engineers and other professionals from partner organizations. The culmination of each project is a prototype device meant to address the stated need. Each May, the prototypes are formally presented and demonstrated the general public at Design Night, an event attended by hundreds from the University, the community, industry and state government. Now in its fifth year, SEED has become a renowned and climactic element in our students’ curriculum and an incubator for ongoing connections on campus  and collaborations between UVM and industry.

We were lucky enough to get two teams working on this project.  The first team has completed their prototype, and you can watch the YouTube video that Ian Pfeiffer and Brian Pinand made of their finished baler!

Ian and Brian will be at our Annual Winter Hops Conference to talk about their design.  We are close to setting a date, stay tuned here for the official announcement!

This project was funded by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets and the Vermont Agricultural Innovation Center through the United States Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, and these funds were secured through the efforts of Senator Patrick Leahy.

The results are in folks!  For the last year the UVM Extension Crops and Soils Team has been collecting extensive data on what hop varieties do well in the Northeast.  Check out the preliminary results from UVM Extension Organic Hops Variety Trial!  Keep in mind that these results are from a first year of production, and variety performance data from additional test sights over several years should be compared before you make a conclusion.