Snap, Crackle, POP!

The evening of Thursday, 21 July, Northcentral Pennsylvania was visited by a pretty intense storm cell. High winds, humid air, rain, thunder, and lighting…a classic thunderboomer.

As is normal during the week, I was at our place in Montoursville. When Jenn woke me up saying she’d heard things on our deck moving around, I went out to investigate. When I did, the way the wind was blowing was odd…starting low from the ground and then upwards, in really strong gusts. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a tornado warning out. I got things secured on our deck and immediately I thought, “Oh s**t, the hopyard!”

It can be frustrating being 2+ hours away from your Farm, but such is life at the moment. I went to bed knowing even if I was there, there was nothing I could do about it. Each day, four times a day, my brother and I get an image from the hopyard from the trailcam. The first arrives at 6am, which even with the light sensitive camera, it can be hard to make out. I saw it, something looked off, but I didn’t think anything about it and back to work at the computer I went. And then I saw the one at noon. “Oh s**t!” was right.

I’m studying the picture and it took me only a few seconds, after the shock wore off, to realize what happened – a pole hadn’t blown over, it snapped in half! The pole, or what was left of it, was standing upright and I could see the coir, bines, and cabling were all still intact. The way we wire our poles together, luckily even in a failure like this, it isolated the issue and it appeared all was not lost.

I shot off a text to my brothers Mike and Devin who live in town. Typically one of them makes a trip out during the day to visit the folks. If it’s Devin, he takes Norris their dog, for a quick walk as well, up past the small hopyard. That day he hadn’t and I knew Mike hadn’t been out there yet. So I sweated it for a few hours until Mike got there and Facetime’d me from the field. Confirmation…snapped in half!

I couldn’t get up there until Friday evening after work wrapped up. Wouldn’t matter anyway, I knew I needed a full day for us to get a new pole in place. Luckily when we put in the large yard, we had a couple extra poles left over. This was the first time we had to dip into our stash.

I got up early Saturday morning after assessing the situation Friday evening when I got up to Saint Marys. First order of business – fire up the IH, attach the bucket loader, add on the pallet forks, bring the heavy chains, and the cant hook to help roll the pole I’d need. My original thought was I’d drag out the new pole from the woods, and scoop it up onto the pallet forks. However, these are black locust poles and if you’re not familiar with them, they are dense as all get out and heavy as hell. I quickly realized trying to balance a 24′ pole on the forks all the way down to the small yard would’ve been comical at best.

Out came the chains, secured it to the 3 point hitch, and slowly across a quarter mile of open field we went. Not an issue. That was step one. The next step would be to get the remainder of the old pole out of the hole, then clear and widen that hole to make ready for the new pole. This was a great opportunity to try the old Farmer trick of removing posts – a solid tire used as a fulcrum, good heavy chains, and a little luck. You place the tire right at the base of the pole, run the chains from the tractor up over the tire and secure it tightly down low at the base of the pole. Thanks to Physics, it pulls the pole out of the hole with much less resistance. Huzzah!

Up to this point, it was all seeming a bit too easy, meaning nothing broke yet and I hadn’t injured myself – the typical gauge I use 😉 Step three had a degree of squirrelliness that could achieve both in one step however. I might be able to at the very least damage the tractor or even flip it (we still don’t have a ROPS yet) and in either situation, it was definite I could bring some injury upon myself. I will say I’m much more cautious than I used to be at a younger age, however there’s always that clock ticking in the back of my head. Too much to do, never enough time to do it. This was not how I’d planned out the work day for Saturday earlier that week.

The choice was either to try and pick up the pole vertically with the bucket and fork and drop it into the hole, or shove the base into the hole while scooting it across the ground, and then raise it into place hoping it dropped down fully into the hole. The first option wasn’t really an option, just a pipe dream (pole dream?). Considering the pole is 24′ tall and thousands of pounds, the angles it’d be working at would flip the tractor like a top. I chose option number two, and although there was still the possibility of flipping the tractor, I had more control over the timing and it’d be easier to ditch the plan if something went awry.

In the end, option two worked quite well. It stands about 6″ taller than the other poles as it’s hard to get the poles all the way in that way, but our end poles are guyed-out in four directions so I was ok with the result. Now came the “fun” part…getting the cables with hundreds of pounds of hops bines on them, secured and in place on the new pole. It was at this point in mid-afternoon brother Mike was able to get out to help. We began the slow, methodical process of disconnecting each of the three cables, and then one often the other using the come along, havens grip, and one of my old climbing ropes to get them rigged.

The primary issue, second to our safety of course, was making sure we didn’t damage the bines. At this point in the season, the base of the bines are quite thick, like the thickness of your thumb. So as long as we didn’t bend them too much or pull the line too tight and uproot them, we should be good. The first two lines went pretty smoothly. The last one (of course) took a little more head scratching than the others. Long story short, all was secured and back in place by 7pm, which left me just enough time and daylight to spray our first batch of kaolin clay to start hopefully ridding the yard of the Japanese beetle infestation we were experiencing…THE worst we’ve seen to date. More on that in a later post.

And that my friends is the story of our first snapped pole. It won’t be the last we’re certain, but it did help emphasize to us that we needed to evaluate the remainder of the other poles and make plans after the season to swap out a few of those as well before Winter sets in.

Such is life at a hop Farm 🙂