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Of course, just minutes after that last post, I went out to look at the hops and realized that some of the cones were turning brown and needed harvesting.  I harvested them by lowering the fence sections to the ground and clipping the cones off at that point.  It worked pretty well in that I did no damage to the main hop vines.  I did have a problem though because the fence sections were not connected well to each other.  One fell forward to the ground while the other stayed a little bit raised off of the ground because of a prop that I was using.  That did break some of the vines.

The two vines I harvested from today were the Cascade and the Chinook.  I only got about seven cones off of the Chinook, but I got a lot more off of the Cascade.  It’s not exactly a bumper crop, but it should be good enough for the first year.  You can see the how much I got in the picture.  As you can see, there are some brown spots indicating that I waited too long to harvest some of the cones.

I also found a number of Saddleback Caterpillars on the vines.  I was stung by one and realized that I needed to be harvesting with gloves on.  Fortunately, my sting wasn’t too bad.  In about an hour, I couldn’t feel it any more.  As I understand the sting of a Saddleback can be pretty nasty.

In any case, now I have a bunch of my own home grown hops.  Tomorrow, the I start drying them out