Mar 20
We took a stroll through our hopyard this morning and look at what we found!
The first bines of the season are emerging from the soil. They’re so tiny, about the size of a bottle cap, we almost didn’t see them.
A new bine pokes through the dirt in the 42-acre hopyard at Rogue Farms.
The floods that closed Rogue Farms for several days last week are drawing down. The road is now passable, and we’re open for business all week.
Normally, we’d be closed today and Tuesday. But we want to make sure you’re stocked up on beer from our New Year’s Garage Sale for your parties.
What you’ll see when you drive in is a lot of mud in the fields.
We had a lot of fun with the kids from the Monmouth-Independence YMCA who came out to the Rogue Farms Hopyard last week.
They’ll be regular visitors this summer. We built raised garden beds for them and they got to work right away digging holes and filling them with the plants they brought with them.
And then they saw the pigs…
When the first flowers of the season appeared in our neighbor’s cherry orchard, we knew the spring nectar flow had begun.
This is one of the prettiest times of the year on the Rogue Farms Hopyard. And for the Rogue Honeybees, one of the busiest.
In Greek mythology, it was the hunter Narcissus who was so handsome that when he saw his own reflection – he fell in love with himself.
Today, we’d call him Tom and he’d be a turkey.
Apr 15
The first big event of the hops growing season is stringing the trellis wires in the Rogue Farms Hopyard.
There are thousands of strings, made from Sri Lanka cocoanut husks, that are tied to the wires, dropped to the ground, and staked into the hop rows.
As you’ll see in the photos, it takes military like precision to get it all done right.
It will not be necessary to bring your own sheep to the workshop.
You don’t have to be a professional wrestler to shear a sheep – but it sure helps.
Getting the right combination of strength and balance while shearing off wool is just one of the things you’ll learn at our DIY Workshop: Sheep Shearing and Spinning. The workshop will be held this weekend at Rogue Farms in Independence, Oregon starting at 1:00pm on Sunday, April 14th. There’s a $10 charge for this workshop, but you’ll be going home with your very own drop spindle.
At Rogue Farms we love DIY. It’s why we grow our own hops, barley, pumpkins, rye, honey and other ingredients for our beers and spirits.
We hold a DIY Workshop every month. Here’s the schedule for the rest of the year.
DIY Workshop Calendar: (All workshops are held on Sundays)
Rogue Farms 