On June 12th Foothills County granted approval of our application to begin an Intensive Vegetation Operation on our property. The Hopyard was a go! Thank goodness it was - we had already ordered a serious amount of stuff.
What does it take to build our hopyard?
-114 Tamarack Poles, 22’ tall
-10,660’ galvanized aircraft cable
-819 wire clips, thimbles, staples
-1,135 plants
-4,000’ of irrigation line
-40,860’ of twine
Job one: poles.
The first task was to get the poles to the farm. We rented a trailer and made 4 trips to Stauffer, Alberta to bring home 114 Tamarack poles. That is 1,800 km and over 23,000 lbs of trees.
The tamarack poles arrive
Once we had the poles we started stripping the bark off the bottom 4’ of each pole. It took 3 of us 2 days to strip 96 poles - and then for the final 20 poles it took 4 of us 31 minutes!
Stripping poles
We are using Tamarack poles because they are known for being very rot resistant. By stripping the bark off the pole that will be in the ground we are decreasing that risk. Their life expectancy is 25 years.
Before we could put an auger to dirt we had to measure out the yard. We spent much time and discussion on the design of our yard. The space we are working with is an L shape and that certainly influenced our choices.
The poles are spaced 42’ apart along the planting rows, and the rows are spaced 14’ and 12’ apart depending on the variety.
Our yard design
We measured and staked, checked and double checked our spacing. The goal was straight lines.
Staking out the yard
On June 14th we dug our first hole. It felt like a huge accomplishment to actually get started. Up went the first pole, a beefy corner telephone pole.
And so it went for days and days. Auger the hole to about 3’, run into rock/clay/challenge of some kind, hand dig the last foot, put a pole it.
We put our last pole in the ground July 2nd. It felt really good to have dug that last hole! But that isn’t the end of the poles. It’s back to the beginning to straighten, backfill with gravel and dirt and tamp securely.
Our last pole was straightened yesterday, July 8!