Diggin Ruuts

This time of year, you can smell the springtime in the air. It’s a familiar smell of light, warm dirt, and greening grass that acts as a herald to the new season of longer days and growth.

With the soil thawed and workable, farms are beginning to come to for the year. Driving the roads around the Yakima Valley, you can see the increased activity in the fields. Under the slim shadows of trellis in a hop field, something has been happening underground. The roots quietly proliferate. Not content to follow the rules, they snub gravity and grow sideways, sending up shoots as necessary. Why does this matter? Because springtime in a hop field means digging those roots—or in farmer parlance—diggin ruuts.

Hops generally aren’t planted by seed, they are planted by root. If someone wants new hop vines, they need to find a root source to put in the ground. Hop farmers supply this demand by going out in the early spring and dividing the roots out in the fields just as the delicate new shoots are just starting to push out.

Out under a dome of blue sky, I check out how it’s done. A working crew of about 40 is spread out over many rows. This is a task that requires some intimacy with the earth. Leaning down over the dried out mound of last year vine, care is being taken to dig around the main root mass.

It smells fantastic as the ground breaks open and the moist underside of the soil is exposed, rich and complex. Because of the horizontal growth, it doesn’t take long to make sense of the medusa head of roots and find segments with the new shoots, or eyes, poking out.

These larger segments can be broken into smaller segments, and bundled for new planting. On and on it goes, with time and patience, and just like that, a potential new hop field is born.

There are so many harbingers of spring in the Yakima Valley: the green hills, orchards shining with new growth pushing through branch tips, brown soils furrowed and seeded, and side-stepping hop roots being dug out of the ground. While Aileen and Shelley and I usually feel like it is good to be rooted, in this case, we agree it’s good to be un-rooted. It means the growing season is here and marching forward like a determined soldier to a steady and reliable beat.