Free plants at Curbside page
Today's pile of plants, 01-Aug-1999...

Some of the plants I put out this week has been out before, see the previous weeks pages for details. Specifically, there's: Lamium, Lupine.

New plants this week:

Hops (Humulus, almost certainly variety "Golden")

This is the plant used for making beer. Note in the photo that the strings the hops are climbing go all the way up the side of the house, two stories -- this is not optimistic. They'll happily go that far, then start along the gutters. If you look carefully at the photo, the middle of the three visible plants has much brigher, almost yellowish leaves -- this is the Golden (Aureus) hop.

Be warned, the reason we pulled the hops is that aphids love them. When the plant is two stories high, it's pretty much impossible to spray them. By the way, a non-toxic spray of dishwashing liquid is fine to get aphids, but they will come back if they're on neighboring plants.

Be sure to cut all the stems all the way down to the ground each winter. Cut back all but the 3 or 4 strongest stems in Spring.