Hops are not only grown on a large scale for beer production. The ornamental and medicinal plant is also a real eye-catcher in the garden. You can also harvest the fruits and make your own beer or soothing drinks. Young shoots are even edible. What you need to know if you want to grow hops yourself.
How to grow hops in the garden or on the balcony?
To grow hops successfully, you need a sunny to partially shaded location, a trellis, nutritious nitrogen-rich soil and enough space. Make sure the substrate remains slightly moist without causing waterlogging and choose female plants for fruit harvesting.
Grow hops in the garden or on the balcony
Hops are an ideal ornamental plant for sunny and shady locations. The fast-growing climbing plant adds greenery to balconies and forms a good privacy screen in the garden during the gardening season.
To plant hops, you need enough space and a trellis. The plants grow up to seven meters high and the roots also spread widely. You should not plant hops too close to neighboring properties (€129.00 on Amazon) to avoid trouble.
Hops can also be grown on house walls because, unlike ivy, the climbing plant leaves no lasting marks on the masonry.
The right location for hops
Hops prefer sunny or partially shaded areas. You can also easily grow the plant on a north wall or grow it in a pot on a north balcony. However, the prerequisite is that the place is bright. If you want to harvest fruit, the location should be as sunny as possible.
- Sunny to shady location
- Trellis
- nutritious, nitrogenous soil
- Substrate slightly moist
- Earth must not dry out
- Avoid waterlogging at all costs
Grow female or male plants?
Only female plants are available in stores. If you want to grow hops yourself from seeds you have harvested yourself, you will only find out what gender the plant is when it flowers.
If you want to grow hops yourself for brewing beer or for obtaining the healing fruits, you need female plants. Only in these does lupullin, the most important hop ingredient for beer, ripen.
In areas where hops are grown for beer brewing, growing male plants is prohibited. It is therefore better to buy hops to grow yourself from a specialist nursery.
Propagate your own hops
Hops can be grown from seeds, but you don't know whether they produce male or female plants. That's why hops should only be propagated vegetatively, i.e. via cuttings.
When are hops ready to harvest?
The hop umbel is ready for harvest when the yellow lupullin has formed inside. This is usually the case in August or September. Unfortunately, it is not possible to see from the outside whether a hop cone is ripe. Unfortunately, all you have to do is open an umbel and take a look.
Overwintering hops properly
Hops are hardy. The plant goes dormant over the winter and sprouts again in the spring. Before winter, cut the hops down to 50 to 70 centimeters. In the spring before budding, shorten the old shoots completely.
Tip
Hop vines wind clockwise around trellises. You have to help with this. Make sure that you only wrap the tendrils around the rods to the right, otherwise the growth will be slowed down.
