By Michael Willis ’17

“Team Hops” ( Michael Willis ’17, Traylor Nichols ’17, Gannon Griffin ’17, and Drew Elliott ’18) have been researching the hops plant specifically pertaining to downy and powdery mildews. While conducting our research we have run into several road locks where we have not had enough plants or enough growth on the plants to be able to run effective tests on the plants. This has lead us to create the Hop Garden behind Gilmer Hall. Five strains of hops are in the process of being planted in the garden: Zeus, Chinook, Cascade, Centennial, and Mount Hood. There were two sets of trellises that were erected with wire hung between them. From the wire twine was hung down for the plants to grow up on.

Willis, Nichols, and Griffin build the new hops garden and plant experimental lines.

Currently several of the Chinook, and Cascade plants have climbed most of the way up the twine. After several of the plants were transferred outside we had a problem with a deer coming and eating many of the leaves off of the vines as well as biting through several vines that were climbing up the twine. The Zeus, and Chinook strains were given to us from the Virginia State University we then started to grow the plants in the greenhouse and they quickly started overtaking the light fixture in the greenhouse. Those plants were the first to be moved outside upon completing the first trellis. We then moved several plants that Ms. Jenkins had collected and rooted prior to the research from the greenhouse out into the garden. We are looking to plant more rhizomes into the new soil as soon as possible.

Dr. Laban Rutto, Virginia State University (right), visits Hampden-Sydney and provides Team Hops and Dakota Reinartz ’18 (left) advice on their growth experiments.

The Hop garden will provide valuable research materials for future summer research projects as well as the Biology 151 lab. The goal is to keep the hops plants in the garden clean from infection of downy or powdery mildew.