So I spent a king's ransom on a stash of hops to get me through the year because of the crazy shortage that's going on. Lot's of folks are trying their hand at growing their own this year, so I thought I'd give it a shot too. Figured I'd have issues with the home owners association if I stood up a bunch of 20-foot poles in the back yard, so I decided the best place I had was going to be along the south wall of the house. It's really the only place that we didn't already have a planter. I was originally going to plant them along the back fence and try to grow them horizontally, but after further inspection decided that was going to be a major pain. My option of digging a new planter really wasn't all that more attractive, but I decided it was closer to the "right" way to do it, so I bit the bullet and started clearing out grass. That's a good time if you've never had the honor.... I wound up with 5 rhizomes this year: Cascade, Hallertauer, Sterling, Chinook, and Fuggle. No clue how they'll do around here. The weather's hotter than they like, and the soil here is hard compact clay which they also don't like. There's luckily a pretty thick layer of fill dirt on that side of the house, so that will help a little. I also dug out a pretty generous area and back-filled it with a 50/50 mix of topsoil and compost. I managed to get the rhizomes into the ground today. Will come back this weekend and extend the chopped-block border around and fill in the rest with compost so that we can put some herbs in there as well and get a little more use out of the area.