Reminder about hops seeds: now is the time.

[barney]

Nice one Seymour I didnt think hops could be grown from the seeds, Duh.

I have some very seedy Northdown, come to think of it I will start to check everything from now on.

[seymour]

Nice one Seymour I didnt think hops could be grown from the seeds, Duh.

I have some very seedy Northdown, come to think of it I will start to check everything from now on.

Might as well, it costs nothing to try. As I've said before, only the females produce hops, so that knocks your odds to 50% at best. Then, the sexually propogated offspring may or may not resemble the parent, which is why named cultivars are always asexually propogated through root/rhizome clonal accessions. The odds of growing these new plants to maturity and getting hops worthwhile for brewing is slim, but so what?

Mine won't necessarily be much like Flyer, yours won't necessarily be much like Northdown, but no matter what they'll contain English high-alpha-acid genetics, which makes for an interesting experiment. We brewers are used to delayed gratification and guesswork. With this, it's just years instead of weeks.

[seymour]

Nice one Seymour I didnt think hops could be grown from the seeds, Duh.

I have some very seedy Northdown, come to think of it I will start to check everything from now on.

Barney, I just noticed your comment about Boadicea in another thread. Those would be some very interesting seeds to work with. Both parents were highly aphid-resistant, highly productive, UK Wye College bred dwarf/hedgerow varieties. If they have decent alpha acids and taste good, what's not to like?

[scuppeteer]

Nice one Seymour I didnt think hops could be grown from the seeds, Duh.

I have some very seedy Northdown, come to think of it I will start to check everything from now on.

Barney, I just noticed your comment about Boadicea in another thread. Those would be some very interesting seeds to work with. Both parents were highly aphid-resistant, highly productive, UK Wye College bred dwarf/hedgerow varieties. If they have decent alpha acids and taste good, what's not to like?

Hit the nail on the head there Seymour, they don't taste that good! The only really decent dwarf variety I have tried and liked a lot is First Gold. I will be brewing with them shortly and will be seed experimenting along with El Dorado and some scrummy Aussie Galaxy!

[seymour]

Maybe the reason Boadicea is considered aphid resistant, is simply that aphids don't like how it tastes either.

I agree that First Gold hops are delicious. Good luck with your seed experiments. El Dorado, eh? Well played.

[floydmeddler]

Wow! Great thread Seymour. Will enjoy follow the progress of the seedlings. With a bit of luck, we'll follow them into a bubbling boiler.

[seymour]

Wow! Great thread Seymour. Will enjoy follow the progress of the seedlings. With a bit of luck, we'll follow them into a bubbling boiler.

Thanks man, that's the dream! The soil dried-out a bit too much while I was at work yesterday, so some little guys withered. I brought the tray in before leaving this morning because we're expecting hard thunderstorms. Needless to say, I could mess up a million ways between now and the boil kettle, but I'll keep you posted.

[barney]

Why will the seeds not be the same plant as the parents?

[seymour]

Why will the seeds not be the same plant as the parents?

To put it very simply (forgive me if I'm insulting anyone's intelligence):

Humulus lupulus plants are distinctly male or female. The hops (flowers) only grow on females. In other words, each of the named hops cultivars you've ever heard of come from a very specific female plant. If the hops contain seeds, that means the flowers were open-pollinated from wind-blown pollen of a nearby male plant (sexual propogation). Thus, the seeds contain 50% genetics from the mother plant (with known, desireable brewing characteristics), and 50% from an unidentified male (not even capable of producing hops, so obviously the contributions to brewing characteristics are completely unknown.) Each of these seeds will result in an all new set of characteristics, maybe resembling the mother, maybe better, maybe worse, it's a craps shoot. Different from the parents and different from each other.

In a planned breeding program, you specifically select males with desirable growth habits, resistance to pests, drought, flood, temperature, etc, in hopes of creating a new cultivar with "hybrid vigor" possessing the best characterists of each. Of course, that's easier said than done, and the next great brewing hop might be "one in a million."

The only way to grow another plant with the exact characteristics as your desireable mother plant is through cloning (asexual propogation), done most simply by separating some rhizome/root material and planting it elsewhere. It can also be done through "greenwood cuttings" of the bines, and applying hormone powder to stimulate new roots, but either way, you end up with genetically identical plants. In this sense, all the Cascade hops plants in the world are the exact same plant. This is why commercial growers pay such close attention to them all season long. If a particular aphid or mildew or fungus or drought or flood, etc, manages to attack one plant, the entire field is at risk to the same degree. The natural protections of biogenetic diversity have been bred-out...

That is, unless you and I spend a little time growing up all-new cultivars and diversifying the gene pool a bit.

[Crispy Hedgehog]

Not wanting to hi-jack the thread - but here is a photo of mine, grown from seed, planted on 12 Jan this year. It's not a brewing hop from what I can gather, but still proves it can be done. I started my own thread on it but not posted anything until this one. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=57497



Stella Cidre Pint bottle for a bit of scale. Use them for my brews....

**edit - correct spelling mistake.

[seymour]

Not wanting to hi-jack the thread - but here is a photo of mine, grown from seed, planted on 12 Jan this year...

Not a hijack at all, thanks for sharing. Further proof it can be done!

UPDATE on my Flyer x O.P. hops seedlings: more have sprouted and many of them have gotten taller and advanced from the first "seed leaves" on to the first set of true leaves, so it's time for me to grow them on in individual containers. I plan to post a new picture at that time. It's likely I'll damage some delicate roots in the transplanting process, but hopefully some will continue thriving. I counted 135 seedlings, so my odds of getting a few worthy plants is much higher than I expected!

Still no Cluster x O.P. sprouts, so I've pretty much given up on them.

[CJR]

Forgive me if you've mentioned this elsewhere, but what climate are you growing your hops in and how will the St. Louis climate affect the hops compared to the UK climate? If it wasn't such a bugger with posting and customs, I'd love to try and compare St. Louie Flyer to UK Flyer.

[seymour]

Forgive me if you've mentioned this elsewhere, but what climate are you growing your hops in and how will the St. Louis climate affect the hops compared to the UK climate?...

Well, I don't know how to answer that exactly. We're a temperate climate, like you for the most part: cold in the winter, sometimes very cold, hot in the summer, sometimes very hot. Very humid due to the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. We're somewhat further south (38°37′38″N 90°11′52″W), so a bit hotter overall, and shorter daylight if I understand correctly, which makes it harder to grow hops agriculturally, but I make do on a very small scale. Ironically, other than Cascade and my Missouri native male which grow so vigorously there is no comparison, the next most vigorous variety for me is "Northern Brewer." Perhaps it should've been called "Brewers Everywhere."

...I'd love to try and compare St. Louie Flyer to UK Flyer.

I'm looking forward to it to, but to be precise, my plants are no longer Flyer. That would require planting a rhizome of your Flyer, for a 100% identical genetic clone. Having grown mine from seed, I must call them Flyer x Open Pollination, as they will each be unique from Flyer and from each other, containing random sequences of half Flyer genes from their mom, and half from the unknown dad. So, there will be definite differences from genetics and terroir.

[timbo41]

So what you really need is a cutting for grafting or a rhizome
jeez,no wonder the growers.can be, shall we say,reticent
Still it's big corporate at end of day
Things you learn on this forum!!
so if I understand correctly you could, should you have them graft say,a cluster to a williamette rhizome and get a mixture of both female.characteristics.
Or is thatba gross over simplification

[seymour]

so if I understand correctly you could, should you have them graft say,a cluster to a williamette rhizome and get a mixture of both female.characteristics. Or is thatba gross over simplification

No, actually, when you do grafting, the fruit you'd get would only possess the characteristics of the "scion", or top part, in your example the Cluster hop. As you probably know, this is how apples are grown. The top part is whatever apple cultivar you want, with desirable flavor characteristics, etc, say Granny Smith, but the root stock can be whatever you want, typically very hardy, drought and disease resistant crap apple types. The bottom part would produce undesirable apples, but they never get the chance. The roots and trunk simply support the desirable top part. The same process is used for grapevines in commercial vineyards...

By contrast, if what you want is indeed a combination of characteristics of two different hops varieties, you must begin a breeding program utilizing sexual propogation to infuse genes from both into an entirely new variety, and hope for the best.