BrewHome Depot trip

I used some comp time today, duly earned from a weekend business trip to Brazil, for a trip to Home Depot. For a homebrewer, there are aisles and aisles of great stuff to be repurposed for homebrewing. Ok, well, mostly its in the plumbing aisle, but my original intent was to get some galvanized pipe to make some hops trellises for my burgeoning plants.

Given advice from this post on BA and after talking with my pop, I went with a ten foot section 3/4 inch galvanized pipe (~$17), a 30inch section (~$7), and a coupler ($3). I also got some 7/8-1 1/4 inch stainless clamps to afix three coir hop twines to the top of the post. I bought a heavy (5lb) mallet, which I used to pound the 30inch section in to the ground. I used a scrap piece of 4x4 that was lying around next to the trash area to prevent damage to the threads (lots of projects in the gardens yields a reliable source of scrap wood). I was able to drive it almost all the way in to the ground, then twisted on the coupler, then the 10 foot pole. Huh. its pretty stable. Cool. Hopefully it'll still feel stable when the twine is loaded with hops and the eventual summer thunderstoms hit.

I tied the three twine lengths to the fence where the hops were already climbing (and looking for more) and wrapped the sun seeking bines around them.

Well, that was pretty easy, fast, and not too expensive. I think if I had to set up a structure that could support multiple hills, I'd likely employ 15ft 4x4 pressure treated posts and run a wire across the top from which to drop twine (which would be more economical on a per plant basis) similar to what you see commecially, but for a single hill, I think this "trellis" will work very well.

Oh, and I got a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler for $38, quite a bit cheaper (almost half) than what you see the LHBS and online shops selling them for. Looks like the next Home Depot project will be to get some copper tubing for my new mash tun.