The Hop Yard.
A third of an acre of hops on wirework, planted in 2023 to find out whether they would grow here. They do. There are nowhere near enough of them to brew with, which is the honest thing to say about it.
- Angle
- Fixed · low · 2.4 m
- Live
- March to September
- Uptime, 90 days
- 98.6%
What it is actually pointed at.
Hawkstone is brewed with barley from this farm. The hops are bought in, because a third of an acre produces a rounding error against a commercial brew and anybody telling you otherwise is selling a story rather than a beer.
What the yard is genuinely good for is watching. A hop bine climbs two to four inches a day in late May and June, and a fixed camera at two and a half metres makes that visible in a way that standing in the row does not.
The frames from this camera are the ones that feed the time-lapse in the archive. Nine hundred stills between April and September, one an hour, and about forty seconds of finished film.
Worth watching when.
| When | What you get |
|---|---|
| Late May to June | The climb. Two to four inches a day, and the reason this camera exists. |
| Late morning | Best light on the wirework. The bines are backlit and you can count the rows. |
| August | Cones. Small, green, and photographed by more people than you would expect. |
| September | Picking, by hand, over an afternoon, by whoever can be persuaded. |
Across the year, on this camera.
Bare wirework and rootstock.
Genuinely dull, and we leave it up anyway.
The growing weeks.
The single best time-lapse subject on the farm.
Cones, then the pick.
Cut back to the crown.
The camera goes to a weekly still.
The rig on this one.
The Hop Yard
- Mount
- Corner post, 2.4 m
- Lens
- Fixed, 28 mm equivalent
- Stream
- 1080p at 25 fps, 2.0 Mbps
- Stills
- One an hour, April to September
- Area covered
- About 0.3 acres, four rows
- Uptime, 90 days
- 98.6%
Uptime is the rolling ninety-day figure. When the stream is not available this page shows the last good frame instead: A weekly still through the winter, which is all a bare wire deserves.
The four things every camera here promises.
Fixed
No pan, tilt or zoom for anybody outside the farm office.
Silent
No audio on this camera or any other.
Pointed at us
No footpath, no neighbour’s land, no public highway in frame.
Fallback
A weekly still through the winter, which is all a bare wire deserves.
The other cameras.
Nine others, all fixed, all silent, all pointed at this farm.
What is worth watching this month.
A table of the whole year, camera by camera, so you are not opening ten tabs to find the one with something in it.
