As December closes, I took time to clean up the hops.  I’d left a bit of each vine with the intention of trying to clone them to give away.  Things got rushed with the rest of the tomatoes and they never got buried.  Now they are just dead vines with no use.

I also cleared out all the weeds around the base of the hops to get back to nice clean mounds.  Everything is looking very good for next season.  I’m starting to ponder weed prevention around the hops.  My current plan is corn gluten meal through the area and the newspaper with hay on top in the areas between the mounds to try and keep the weeds at bay for next year.

If you click on the image, you can see a label for each variety of hop.  On the left side of the area, the hops are all (Kent) Goldings.  A great aroma hop and dry hop but not much else.   The right side is all the variety.  That creates a challenge of tracking which one is which.

This year I used Popsicle sticks to track them but by the end of the year, the mud and grit had made it difficult if not impossible to read and finding the things was a colossal challenge.  For next year, the markers are two foot long posts stuck in the ground.  Each is labeled in pretty large writing with a coating of polyurethane on top (water based) to seal the wood and (hopefully) keep the boards clean and easy to read.

I also spent time working on the strawberries.  The 3 inch piping seems to work very well if they stay moist and you can keep the birds away.  I cut back the dead material off the existing plants so everything is ready for next year.

The growth wasn’t significant last year and almost no fruit however I think that two things will affect the strawberries this year.  The first and most important is regular water.  The big tube above has a small tube that rides above it with water.  Up until last July, this didn’t exist and water was dependant on what fell on the tube from the standard system.

The second major change is just purely being the second year.  The plants now have a decent root system in place and should be able to produce much more growth and fruit based on that alone.  Time will tell but I’m hoping to get a number of fresh strawberries off the plants in 2012.   One other modification will be old CDs hanging above the plants to try and keep the birds away.