On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 08:37:02PM -0400, Rick Womer wrote: > Nice pic; I like the colors and the hills rising in the background. > > How tall are the bines? Years ago I was in Kent hop country for a conference, > and took a country walk; I was surprised that the bines towered over me, 7 or > 8 feet tall. >
Back when I was a nipper (some 60 years ago ...) we lived right by a farm that grew hops. The hop fields looked rather different from those that Philip shows; they started out the same, but about five feet up the hops split four ways, going out to four different points about another five feet up. Harvesting was done using a tractor driving between the hop poles with a man supported in a tower behind the tractor driver's seat; the second man reached out and cut the hops 10' up with a sharp blade on the end of a pole. Originally the hops were just transported to a nearby field for hand picking (by itinerant seasonal workers, mostly from the east end of London, but including a few Romany groups) somewhat later one of the barns was converted to house an automated hop picking machine. Our next-door neighbour was the hop foreman; when the farm got out of hop production he was hired by Whitbread to manage their hop gardens - the largest in Europe at the time. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
