Hop Cultivation. 
251 
planters provide bell tents, but they are not quite fit for women 
and children in wet seasons. Cooking-houses are also provided 
lean-to buildings with open fronts, with chimneys, and rows of 
hooks to hang cooking-pots upon. Accommodation for hop- 
pickers entails considerable expense upon the owners and 
occupiers of hop farms, especially as it is required by public 
opinion that this should be fit and proper for human beings. 
Upon some farms in Kent as many as 1,500 strangers are 
annually employed and housed. 
The pickers are told off in companies of eight to ten, under 
the charge of a “ binraan,” who pulls up the poles for them, 
and holds the pokes, or sacks, when the measurer comes round 
to measure the hops picked. The binman cuts the bines about 
3 ft. from the ground and pulls up the poles with a wooden 
lever with iron teeth, termed a “dog,” and carries them to the 
pickers, who pick them into a bin, a long, light, wooden frame 
with a sacking bottom, or in some places into a basket. It is a 
good method when hops are picked before they are quite ripe, 
or if the plants are weak, to cut the bines 5 ft. or G ft. high and 
push the part with hops upon it up and over the poles with 
forked sticks. By this the lower portion is kept to the poles, 
and the bines do not bleed or lose sap nearly so much as if they 
are cut close and lie on the ground. 1 This is extensively adopted 
in many of the hop-producing districts. Two pickers take one 
bin. Bins are used in many parts of Kent and in Sussex, 
Worcestershire, and Hereford. In East Kent the hops are 
picked into large baskets holding 5 bushels. In Hampshire 
and Surrey they are picked into baskets holding 7 bushels. 
When picked, the hops are measured from the bins or baskets 
into “ pokes,” “ greenbags,” or sacks, holding 10 bushels. 2 The 
measurer, who measures the hops for six or seven companies, is 
accompanied by a boy who enters the number of bushels picked 
in a book kept by each picker, and also in a book retained by 
himself. 
Before a ground is picked, it is divided or set out into as 
many small “sets,” or portions, of 100 hills, as there are com- 
panies, for which lots are drawn by each binman, so that there 
may be no wrangling over good or bad sets. It is necessary to 
supervise hop-pickers with close care and to see that they pick 
the hops free from leaves, and singly, and not in bunches. 
1 This practice is of very ancient origin, as Reynolde Scot wrote in 1576. 
“ Then you may with the forked ende thrust up or shove oil all such stalks as 
remayne upon eche hoppe poalc.” Op. cit. 
2 In Hampshire and Surrey these sacks are called “ sarpliers,” and hold 
fourteen bushels. 
