Beer Forum

Hey,

I was just randomly surfing the net and came accross the EarthBox. Its a system for growing plants in a container that automatically waters the plants.

http://www.earthbox.com/

Have any of you guys tried out the EarthBox? Does it work with hops?

They're pretty steep at $60 each, but there are plans all over the net on how to make one for under $10.

Any thoughts?

Sean.

I have several Earthboxes and even construct my own from 3 and 5 gallon buckets. They're also known as sub-irrigation planters. I've grown all kinds of things in them and they work great for many types of fruits and vegetables and not so much with others. This will be my first year growing hops and I plan to attempt them all in my "Earthbuckets." I've heard of people growing hops in containers so I don't see why these wouldn't work. Hopefully somebody has attempted this before and will be able to give us some insight.

I'm back. Like I said before I planted hops in my "earthbuckets" and waited to see what they would do. I also devised what I think is a pretty clever way of training the vines so that everything is self contained and can easily be moved around. These were planted on May 20. These pictures were taken on July 5th. I ordered three rhizomes: Zeus, Sterling, and Willamette. All three were planted in the same soil, under the same conditions. The strongest grower is Zeus. It took off immediately. Willamette started off like Zeus, then stopped growing, and now has started up again. It has a LONG ways to go to catch up to Zeus though. Sterling never sprouted. I also included some pictures of my "earthbuckets" in case anyone wanted to build their own.

This is the Zeus strain.







Here is Willamette.





Here is the bottom of the earthbucket. Just set this inside another bucket and the space between the buckets is the water reservoir. You can't see it very well, but on the bottom of the bucket there are a bunch of little holes drilled to allow roots to grow through and water to evaporate up.




There are already tons of little hop cones already forming on Zeus. I'll post some more pictures before I harvest.