SEPTEMBER is usually the time when you can replace your hop bines or refresh your hop pillows for a good night’s sleep!  The season this time around started in AUGUST. 

Hop gardens tend to cut hops for only about three weeks.

Once cut and hung up, the leaves will shrivel, and the hop flowers will stay to provide that famous Kentish feature. So, when selecting your bine, make sure they have ample flowers.

There are many hop growers around Lynsted that will supply full length hopbines that can be hung up over your fireplace, over a door, above a cupboard or where ever your imagination says.  Be careful to choose a position where you won’t brush past it because as the hob dries out, if you brush past the hopbine, you get a shower of ‘petals’ onto your carpet.

Talking of carpets, try to avoid standing on green hops as they will stain.  We tend to keep an old bed sheet to lay the bine out while deciding which piece goes where.

For the first few days you should sleep wonderfully. The grower that we get our hops from always warns you to drive home with a window open to stop you snoozing!

Tradition tells us that the old and the new hop bines paths should not cross.  Put another way, the old hop bine should leave the house at the same time as the new one coming in, but by a different door.  This symbolises the continuation of prosperity in your home.

We would thoroughly recommend a visit to the Faversham Hop Festival, which is listed in our Events Page.  There are usually hop bines sold off the back of a tractor trailer at the Station end of Faversham.   Of course, hops are the bedrock of beer and our local brewery, Shepherd Neame is a regular sponsor of the Hop Festival.

To find a convenient hop farm, you could do worse that go to Google and type in “Hop Gardens in Swale”. Some publications of interest include -

• Kent Tourism Website is one place to start your exploration.
• “The Hop Trail” (PDF document from Kent Tourism about hops and a real ale map of Kent)
• CAMRA-Swale Website.  Campaigning to keep beer with character.

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