Well as most of you know, I decided on growing hops on my farm. There are many reasons for this: due to a hop shortage prices for hops are quite high, I've always been fascinated by the plant since in can grow up to a foot a day, its kinda a low maintenance crop meaning I can leave it alone for a couple weeks, and of course hops flavors beer so business research means drinking beer. All of these are sound reasons to grow hops, but now the choice of conventional farming or organic farming comes to play. Being who I am I chose organic, since the modern agricultural mainstream is not so slowly destroying the environment. (Don't read anything by Michael Pollan if you want to keep a sound trust in conventional agriculture)

So the first step to growing hops is building a trellis. Being a plant that can grow a foot each day, you need about 18 foot trellises. Just saying it and visualizing it is a big difference. Here is a photo of a good hops trellis.

Being organic those poles can't leach any chemicals into the soil and therefore must be untreated. Sounds easy enough, but I've spent over a month searching for cedar poles at 22' long. At long last I've found them in New Jersey. Today I buy them... yikes. This is a big step since this is the point of no return. If I buy the poles and decide not to farm hops, I then have 150 22' poles which I spent far too much money on to use as firewood. So today is the moment of truth. I'm going to turn by back fields into massive trellises. I better enjoy pickin' rocks, because after today there is no going back... I'm a farmer.