As we wrapped up the harvest season at Rogue Farms, the last of the crops to come in from the field just happen to be the ones that taught us our most valuable lessons of the year. Lessons such as: Don’t plant your corn before it’s picked, never turn your back on a jalapeño pepper, and you can learn a lot about growing marionberries by growing hops. Sometimes the lessons sting. Sometimes they’re humbling. But either way, they motivate us to try again, try harder and improve.
In this edition of the Rogue Farms Crop Report we’ll show you some of these lessons and what we did to get better. The results were outstanding. A beautiful bounty of corn, peppers and, coming next year, more marionberries. Learning as we grow is what it’s all about. Because as we become better farmers, we also become better maltsters, roasters, smokers, brewers and distillers.
Don’t plant your corn before it’s picked
Turn back the clock to the summer of 2014 and we thought we were corn geniuses. Our first crop of Wigrich Corn was growing fast and strong in the summer sun of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. What could possibly go wrong? What went wrong is that we never found someone to help us harvest it. So rather than let it rot in the field we picked all five acres by hand, shucked it all by hand and then discovered much of it was too moist to malt.
Lesson 1: Don’t plant your corn until you know how you’re going to pick it.
This year, we found our harvester first and then planted. It all paid off in early October as the combine rolled through the rows and reaped, shucked and shelled every ear in under two hours. But that wasn’t the only lesson. We learned from malting last year’s crop that our corn needs to spend more time drying in the field before we bring to it to the Farmstead Malt House in Tygh Valley. Taking that lesson to heart, we planted two months earlier. This year’s mechanical harvest was over in 91 minutes. Last year’s hand picked harvest ran three days.
How’d we do? Our maltsters will let us know in the next few months. Even with the difficulties of last year’s crop we mashed and distilled some mighty fine Rogue Spirits bourbon. As it ages in the ocean air of Yaquina Bay, the next batch of bourbon is winding its way from the dirt to the distillery.
Kiln it with our jalapenos
Very little went wrong with last year’s crop of jalapeños — except for ones we let sit in their packing crates for too long. Our small kiln in Tygh Valley couldn’t keep up with last year’s bounty of peppers. It’s a good thing we had more than we needed for Brewmaster John Maier to craft Chipotle Ale. When we started distilling Chipotle Whiskey, our distillers began clamoring for peppers too. Our challenge for this year was to make sure every pepper was put to work. No more room for errors.
Lesson 2: Don’t turn your back on a pepper. Always pay attention.
We planted our two acre patch of jalapeño starters back in spring. While some of our other crops griped about the record heat we had this summer, the jalapeños absolutely loved it. It must have reminded them of their ancestral homeland in Mexico. Pepper picking is unlike any other harvest here at Rogue Farms. There’s no machine that can separate the red ones from the green ones. We have to pick them by hand. Complicating things, they don’t all ripen at the same time. It can take a couple of weeks from when the first ones turn red, to when the last of the crop is ripe.
This year’s jalapeño harvest began in late September. It took us almost two weeks to pick two acres. Here’s how we handled it. On harvest days we picked only the red peppers and left the green ones behind to continuing ripening. It took us six days over two weeks until the entire crop was done. Most pepper growers don’t go to all this trouble. But we do because we want only fully ripe red peppers. Red jalapeños are what’s best for smoking into chipotles. After all, we brew Chipotle Ale and mash Chipotle Whiskey, so let’s give Brewmaster John Maier what he needs.
Here’s how we handled another problem: How to preserve our peppers before smoking them. Within minutes of coming out of the patch, we hauled our peppers into the hop kiln and slowly dried them for five days. The aroma was unlike anything we’ve smelled before. It tickled our throats and caused our eyes to water. We felt like we were swimming in salsa.
When drying was over, then we trucked the peppers 77 miles to the Brewery and Distillery in Newport where our fellow Rogues slowly smoked them in small batches over fires of alder and cherry. Just like last year, Maier will have plenty of chipotles to brew as much Chipotle Ale and mash as much Chipotle Whiskey as he wants. Our distillers will have all they need to infuse even more chipotle flavor during distillation and to add some in the barrels when we ocean age Chipotle Whiskey.
What do marionberries have in common with hops? Click “Next page” to continue the crop report harvest.
Because marionberries don’t train themselves
There’s a big difference between a garden patch and an honest-to-goodness farm field. It’s not just increased acreage or more plants. There’s a whole new approach to how you seed, cultivate and harvest when you make the transition from gardener to farmer. We saw this when we planted this year’s crop of Prickless Marionberries. Our crops in previous years were small by professional standards. But this spring we grew our little patch into a two-acre field, planting 1602 marionberry starters by hand.
Lesson 3: You can learn a lot about growing marionberries by growing hops.
Like hops, marionberries are born to climb. And also like hops, they need a trellis. In the garden, that may be a wooden trellis you can buy at your local nursery. On Rogue Farms, we built our trellis from scratch, digging poles into the ground and connecting them by wires. The similarities don’t end there. Both crops need to be trained.
Back in August we pulled all the long marionberry canes off the ground and trained them by hand, tying the canes to the trellis wires with coir, the same material we use to train and tie hops. There was no harvest this season. Marionberries don’t produce the year they’re planted because they need to go through a hard frost before they’ll grow fruit. But we’re confident of a good crop next summer. Here’s why.
Prickless marionberries are perfectly matched to the terroir of the Willamette Valley. They need cool, but not cold, temperatures in winter, and long sunny days in summer. This is no accident. Marionberries were developed 60 years ago by the USDA and Oregon State University right across the river from our farm in Marion County, Ore. Today, they grow so well here that Oregon produces nearly all of the crop in the United States.
The untold story about our marionberries is their relationship with the Rogue Farms honeybees. When the tiny, white flowers pop next year, these trellises will be filled with millions of bees, happily foraging among the blooms collecting nectar and spreading pollen.
With the best marionberry terroir in the country, and with the help of our honeybees, we’re looking forward to strong harvests of marionberries and honey next summer. What we pick we’ll juice, and what the bees provide we’ll gather. Then we’ll deliver both crops to John in Newport where he will go to work brewing Rogue Farms Marionberry Braggot.
Plan bee
By the time Autumn rolls around, the Rogue Farms honeybees are in survival mode. All they’ve got to get by through the winter is the honey stored in the hive and the supplemental feed we provide them. And so begins the culling season. The first to go are the drones. Mating season is over and the male bees no longer serve a purpose. They’re dragged outside and left on their own to die of exposure and starvation.
Lesson 4: It sucks to be a drone in the fall at Rogue Farms.
Inside the hive, the queen has stopped laying eggs. The population of the colony drops dramatically. From a summer peak of 70,000 to 100,000 bees per colony, the population shrinks to 10,000 to 15,000 bees in winter. Our job now is to help our bees survive the cold months. We’ll put out sweet syrup, pollen cakes and water, so the bees can feed themselves. If necessary, we treat for mites and diseases.
Come February, we send our bees south to pollinate a California almond orchard. The warm temperatures and ample supplies of nectar and pollen keeps them healthy until they return to us in spring. We’ll greet them with a display of wildflowers, orchard flowers and flowering marionberries, pumpkins, jalapeños and botanicals. From spring through summer, our bees sample all the flavors of the terroir of Rogue Farms. You’ll taste it too, in the honey we use to make our kolsch, meads and braggots.
Putting our hops to bed
In the hopyard, our seven varieties of hops are settling down for winter, a period of dormancy. The bines are dying off, returning their nutrients down beneath the soil to the rhizomes, where it will be stored until next spring’s growing season. We’ll give them an assist by adding a layer of composted bines and coir from previous harvests. This will seep more nutrients into the dirt and retain moisture.
In the next few weeks, we’ll plant spring barley between the rows of hops. This is a cover crop, grown only to prevent soil erosion during winter floods. Because we’re planting it out of season it won’t grow kernels and will die off in the spring. Before the winter rains arrive, the barley will form a thick carpet over the hopyard. The network of roots keeps the soil in place, and when it floods the stalks will lie down for added protections.
Lesson 5: Floods happen.
We wouldn’t stop them if we could. Flooding replenishes the soil with moisture and nutrients at a time when hops need them the most. Each time it floods, the water releases another layer of rich, volcanic sediment on the hopyard. Flooding is how Mother Nature grows dirt.
This information was all provided from the fine folks at Rogue Ales & Spirits and the Rogue Department of Agriculture. Big ole thanks to Rogue Farms for letting us reproduce this.
