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Five ‘male’ hop plants seeks female mate; must be prepared to re-locate to the HoBB Gardens or donate a cutting or root for a good cause : flowers!

Seriously, we do, as only the female plant produces the well loved flower garlands for drying and all of our hop plants at the HoBB are male.

We knew the need for a female hop plant thus realised we might get a male when buying our first Hop plant, but our second, and our third ..4th and 5th! For them all to turn out as male is against the odds.

Garden centres have no way of knowing which sex is which when the plants are less than 2 or 3 years old so I’m told, but of course they still sell all the young ones alongside photographs of the favoured female flowering gender.

So we are on the search for a female hop plant ‘guaranteed’. If you have a female (Hop Plant) or maybe you have some hop seeds, as we would definitely get one female from seed, please contact us and make five male plants very happy ;)

Waves from the World’s First Hop Dating Agency
~~~~~~~~~~ <+))))))))>< ~~~ Grant

I have just spent one week at The HoBB, working on various projects with other residents, and these experiences have incorporated a dimension which has not been present in many of my other *wwoofing experiences (or at least not to the same extent).
This dimension concerns the need to incorporate our own individuality into our everyday lives – and not just in a peripheral manner, but ‘within the roots’ of that which determines the shape of our day-to-day lives.

With many other environments, which may be compared with The HoBB, the sheer weight of ‘practical necessity’ often makes it difficult to create a truly fertile environment, in which every person’s individuality is given the air which it needs to breathe. But life at the Hobb seemed to provide a healthy contrast to this – and on each day of my short visit it almost felt like there was some kind of intangible and unfamiliar presence reaching out to grab hold of something within me and drag it out into the open !!

Unfortunately, I am not accustomed to this presence, in this particular form, and this lack of familiarity meant that within the space of one week I only had the opportunity to shake hands and exchange a few winks with it !! But this was sufficient encouragement for me to make some modest contributions to life at The Hobb – which involved some kind of personal creativity and expression from myself.

For example, I was engaged in the creative process of producing some decorative cement tiles – and in other environments this would have made me feel like I was doing something non-essential or even indulgent. But the environment at The HoBB made me feel that by applying myself to this activity I was simply responding to another basic human need – and it seems to me that within the context of a short, one-week visit The HoBB put me in touch with this basic truth in a way which was particularly effective and liberating. And I think that this is the best way of summarising my visit to the HoBB.

Posted by Rob Lockwood

* Wwoof (www.wwoof.org)