@ psytramp: Do your hops tune into SBS? Looks like a sweet antenna!
Variation within my backyard:
My parent crown of
PoR has come up and then done nothing. Am I worried? No, it'll do it's thing when it wants to. Normal cigarette lighter in picture for scale.
Saaz parent crown and some cuttings from last year are just starting to get interested in growing.
In contrast to these plants, my
Hersbrucker parent crown (transplanted from a barrel into the garden bed this year) is going gangbusters and has got to the top of the 3.5m flagpole trellis. It has too many bines to be able to count them.
Flagpole trellis to the left (4.5m above garden bed soil surface, ~5m above lawn) : my
Chinook parent crown, also transplanted from a barrel into the garden bed this year, has as yet thrown only one bine that is currently about <10cm in length. What you see up to about 2m are the growth from some rhizomes I split off the parent crown at transplanting time. The split rhizomes were kept in the fridge for a while and then planted out.
The tree to the right is the
neighbour's gorgeous nectarine tree. The fruit are slip stones with a white flesh and are magnificent. I harvested 50 Kg of fruit from it last season and that was only from as far across the fence as I could reach! We would only have access to less than 20% of the tree from our side.
Note:
I have both variation between varieties and amongst varieties. I am not worried about how yours are growing comparatively, or how mine are growing.
The fricking caterpillars were giving some a hard time so I have sprayed a caterpillar specific bacteria inoculant onto them.
I constructed my trellis' (or flagpoles) so there is a minimum amount of horizontal surfaces for birds to perch on and poop from. We have gazzillions of birds in the area thanks to some big trees the neighbours have.
My experience is once the bines have started to burr the bine stops growing any longer
I second that!