The hops are doing pretty well, for containers and the first year. The Cascade started off great, but has showed down. Chinook going wild, lots of clusters. Centennial very slow, with only a few clusters. Glacier growing like, well, a glacier. Don't think I will see anything from it this year. However, as any Philadelphia sports fan will tell you on opening day, Wait 'til Next Year. 

Here you can see Cascade in the foreground, then Glacier, then Centennial, then Chinook.  

Here we have Chinook on the left, and Centennial in the middle. You can see that the Glacier is doing nothing.   

Here are the Chinook close up. My brew buddy Ken and I are getting ready for Fresh Hop beer this fall.

The hops are growing! It hasn't gotten very hot here yet; today will reach 80, with rain predicted, so they really haven't taken off. I don't expect much this first year, maybe just enough hops for a batch of beer. 

Here is a shot of my finished rig. We are all scroungers here at my plant, so we built the entire rig from things we had here. We used old drums that couldn't be recycled, a section of fence post and an old sign from the junkyard that used to be next door, and some fence clamps we found amidst the junkyard debris. Having a forktruck to help set up the heavy post helped.  

I knew that the soil here at my plant was not good enough for growing anything, so I ordered 5 yards of topsoil. I cut the top off of 4 55-gallon plastic drums, then solvent-cleaned the outsides, primed with an oil-based primer, and put 2 coats of white outdoor paint over the entire drum. It gets very hot here in the summer, and I am hoping that the white paint will help keep the roots relatively cool. I drilled a few holes in the bottom for drainage, and some in the rim at the top for my strings.

For a trellis we took the forktruck and tore an old section of fencing out of the ground. An old signpost was welded to it, so we cracked the welds off. I dug a hole in the clay here, sank the fence post into the hole, and poured some concrete mix into the hole. After tamping the concrete I flooded the entire operation with water to set up the concrete, and I was almost done. I clamped a section of angle iron to the signpost to run my strings to. After these pictures were taken we attached the signpost to the fence post with some fencing clamps 

I ordered 4 types of hops from www.freshops.com: Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, and Glacier. when they arrived they looked just like a chunk of tree root. I kept them in the refrigerator, moist in a plastic bag, until planting day. Here they are just before planting.

I decided to grow my own hops this year.