A hop plantation requires the growth of some years before it is in perfection. The plants begin to push up their young stems about the month of April. When these are three or four inches above the ground, poles about twenty feet high are driven in to support them during their growth. The season for picking hops usually commences about the middle of September. This work is performed by men, women, and children. Proper baskets, bins, or cribs being in readiness, the plants are cut off close to the ground, and the poles are drawn up. These are placed upon the bins, with the plants upon them, and three or more persons on each side, pick off the hops. After this they are dried in a kiln, and, when dry, are carried into, and kept, for five or six days, in an apartment called the stowage-room, until they are in a state to be put into bags. This is done through a round hole, or trap, cut in the floor of the stowage-room, exactly equal in dimensions to the mouth of the bag, and immediately under which this mouth is fastened. In each of the lower corners of the bag a small handful of hops is tied; and a person, called the packer, places himself in it, and, by a heavy leaden weight, which he constantly moves round in the places where he is not treading, presses and forces the hops down, in a very close manner, into the bag, as fast as they are thrown to him by another labourer. The work thus proceeds till the bag is quite full, when each of the upper corners has a few hops tied in it, in the same manner as those at the bottom. These serve as handles for moving the bags. The bag is then taken away, and its mouth is properly sewed up and secured. The hops of finest colour and best sample are put into bags of finer manufacture than the others, under the denomination of _pockets_; and the inferior sorts are packed in canvas of coarser kind, called _bags_. When the hop-picking is completed, the poles are cleared from the binds or plants which adhered to them, and are stacked or piled together. The _binds_, when perfectly dried, are either stacked or placed in sheds, to be used as fuel in ovens, or otherwise. Sometimes they are burnt upon the land, for the ashes to serve as manure, trodden in the farm-yard, or allowed to be taken away by the labourers for their own use. As the hop-plants are liable to be injured in various ways during their growth, they are considered a very precarious crop. They suffer from the attacks of insects, from honey-dew, from blight, from hot sunny weather after rain, and by winds and storms.