hops and hemp (and fiber, too)

Hey Beadnik! your hops guess was a good one, because that was going to be my next “guess this photo”

Here it is, coming up self seeded in the pots by my outdoor shower.

Now, I have always read that hops are difficult to get started, but that has not been my experience. These came from the Whitewater River in South Eastern Indiana. Hops grows wild all over the river banks there. Introduced by the early German settlers, I would imagine. This would be the rampant, wild type, not the fancy, highly sought after beer making varietal types. When I lived in Metamora, I had a large (and exclusively) container grown garden, having no yard to speak of. I had hops in a pot growing up the porch railing. When I brought some of the potted perennials back down to Tennessee with me, the hops seeds, prolific and hidden in the dirt, came along too.

Each year I train them up the posts of the outdoor shower and collect, dry and jar some of the hops (female flower cones, called strobiles) for tea for when you can’t sleep. I emphasize the training part, cause these rampant, weedy vines are very scratchy, and they can cut you, cut you bad, if they nod over onto your naked body while you are showering.

You are probably asking what this has to do with fiber. Well, hops and hemp are in the same family (Cannabaceae) and both are paper making candidates. Home scale paper making is is one of those arts that appeals to fiber people, but others get that little wrinkle in the middle of their forehead and have to wonder why…

Anyway, I am back on hemp and during research stumbled on this interesting page from the hemp museum on the chronology of paper making. I found the notes that “by the 1860’s America used more paper than france and england combined” really revealing as well as that in this time period 88% of the content of paper was still made from recycled rags. If you are like me and into chronologies, this is fascinating stuff…

More spring photos..

First, I would like to comment on the comments of my previous post regarding hemp.

Cyndy, thank you so much for the pertinent information!

Cyndy commented:

The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 would finally allow North Dakota, and the other states that have passed pro-hemp legislation or resolutions (Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia), considered pro-hemp legislation or resolutions (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin), or where farm groups have advocated for a return to industrial hemp farming (Ohio and Pennsylvania), to choose whether or not to let farmers grow industrial hemp.
You can write congress and tell them to support this Legislation.
http://www.congressmatters.com/storyonly/2009/3/11/1564/14758/244/775

Regarding the bud photo for bonus points;

Sue guessed hydrangea (good guess, as they are also opposite, but they are still in tight bud, and I had to go look at them after your guess to find them very serrated along the bud edges, but a more hempy color, btw, should have hung the ball of hemp on the hydrangea, I guess)

No, not hellebore either, more common than that…..so the quiz is still open…here is today’s photo of the same buds, 7 days later.

This has been the gloomiest, grayest, chilliest winter I can ever remember in Tennessee, so any little spring glimmer is welcome. And what could be more cheerful than a baby goat or two? I am happy to report that we breezed through kidding with no trouble. Lambing will be next month.

These little girls are from my dairy does, but their daddy is a meat goat, and they look more like him.

Hemp and the color of money and spring

Most people already know the history of Hemp in the US. The story of hemp and paper, of US paper and oil company greed, how hemp could save the forest, etc. We forget these fights in the midst of other problems, but boy, it sure comes back when you go to buy a couple of balls of hemp knitting yarn for a particular project (knitted hemp sprout bag, pattern coming soon)

It is hard to find, and expensive and I would love to grow it myself here in my garden, to experiment with processing and spinning it from scratch. But legalization ain't gonna happen in my lifetime, I am afraid.
Anyway...

I think it is a lovely color, and the grass is just starting to green here now, but this hemp sport weight is about the color of the winter bleached grass and weed stalks.

Bonus points for the identification of the promising spring buds acting like a hat hook here in this photo. I write this as pellets of sleet hit the window and I work on spindolyns close by the fire. Not many more days like this, I am sure, as the spring beauties and toothwort are already blooming in the woods, under the thin layer of ice.