First Hop Harvest

Three hop rhizomes were purchased in back in April and planted in early May: two Cascades and a Centennial. One failed to come up and one I think was on its way up but got dug up or died or something, so I only had one Cascade make it:

The single brave Cascade, climbing up a line on May 31st.
Tomatoes in the foreground.

They do grow pretty quickly:

Mid July: it's about 12-14 feet tall, at the limit of the deck.

Late July: Hop flowers showing up.

I was a little optimistic on the yield, so I built an oast to dry my hops. There were plans in The Homebrewer's Garden for this, but I found an adaptation of that on Instructables that seemed to be simpler and use less material, so I built one of the boxes with the intention of building more when I have more hops to dry.
The hops have been ready to get harvested for probably a couple of weeks now.

Some are pretty brown and dried out. I didn't include them.

I went ahead and snipped off all the hops that were ready. It seemed like I got a lot, but it was only about 2 oz (and then should reduce to about 1/6 of that after drying). There were still some immature hops left on the bine that I'll get later. Supposedly your hop plants will double production every year for the first few years, so that's nice. Plus I plan on having more than just the one bine next year.

The first harvest. 2.08 oz wet.

I didn't use the wire mesh in the box to dry the hops since I had so little. If you don't have a big harvest, The Homebrewer's Garden says you can just put them in a paper bag and put that in a warm space with a lot of circulation and shake it every once in a while. I think they'll take about a week to dry this way. Now I jsut need to brew something...