PIcked another 4-5 litres of strawberries. And some radishes.  Some of the beetroot are pingpong sized, another week or two and we can start pulling them up..
No rain so we have to water the vegetable agarden and the polytunnel.  The grow-bags are drying out very quickly in the polytunnel.
The hemp is starting to produce flowers in some places, but they are not yet blooming.  The hemp field s very uneven.  In some places the plants are about one metre tall (around the edge mostly) but in the centre the plants are barely showing.  Not sure why, but there is a lot of competition from other plants.

Picked about 4 litres of strawberries.

Very hot weather - 30C on Wednesday and almost the same on Thursday no rain.

Edit:  Downloaded the data from the weather station.  We had a maximum temperature of 32.1 C on 26th June. Hottest day of the year so far and probably a record for Rosendal, at least since we have been here.

Some years Midsummer is all about standing around a midnight bonfire in wellies and waterproofs.  But some years the sky is so blue and the air is so warm, it is magical.  This year we had the sunshine, a supermoon, and a fierce wind that felt like the Mistral.

At Rosendal the water crisis is over, the recent rain has brought everything on - we picked our first strawberries (outdoors) yesterday.  And put netting over them all!

The blackcurrant bushes in Ovanträsk have hardly any fruit this year but up at Rosendal the older bushes near the house are covered.  Not much action in the raspberries, neither in the wild nor the cultivated ones.  But the newly planted blueberry bushes (mustikkapensas) are covered in fruit. 

 

We had torrential rain all weekend. Maybe a bit late for the raspberries which don't look too happy at all but just in time for everything else.  The shallow well near the house is full again and we have added some extra rainwater barrels so that we can water the blackcurrants even if the well temporarily dries up. 

Up the road, R. is selling new potatoes from his kiosk, but we will wait another week or so before we start to dig ours up.  The deer have been nibbling the tops up at the house but don't appear to be digging them up, yet.

We have masses of strawberries, I think we should be able to pick some next weekend, so at least 2 weeks earlier than usual, thanks to the hot sunny weather in May.

I planted a few rows of kaskinauris up at the house. This root vegetable is a traditional Finnish turnip which was grown all over Finland (including Lapland) before potatoes were introduced.  It featured prominently in the Finnish diet.  The taste is delicioulsy sweet, not unlike swede. 

This turnip was often the first crop to be grown on forest land that had been cleared (slash and burn). It has a short growing season, just 8 weeks.

Of course, I will have to cover them up as the deer absolutely love them.

Rain at last.  Not torrential but enough that we don't have to rig up more hoses from the lake.
The well up at the house had dried up completely, so maybe in a few days it will have filled up again.
Now we can sit back for a day or two and watch things grow.  The hemp should really get going now and hopefully the wild raspberries will recover; they are one of the main sources of pollen for the bees.  More rain to come on Sunday and Monday too - this is more like a real Finnish summer!

The weather forecast for Raseborg is predicting heavy rain for Friday.  At last.
Unfortunately they are also predicting wind speeds of 10-11m/sec which is not so great. 
Peter is planning to head out there tomorrow to tie more anchors over the polytunnel.
The weather for Raseborg:

We are testing hemp in a small field on the east side of the pond and on a smaller patch on the north side of the pond. Probably about one hectare in total.
http://www.azurizon.com/pages/about-hemp
It hasn't rained since we sowed the seeds... not one drop of rain.  Amazingly the seeds have germinated and some of the plants are almost 30cms high.  But the growth is very patchy and in some places the growth is less impressive.  So we have started watering the field just to dampen the surface before the rain arrives (on Friday). 

We managed to acquire some wooden packing boxes that we have recycled as raised beds.  These things cost a small fortune if you buy them from a garden centre. They are not made of impregnated wood, so we stand them on bricks -  otherwise they would rot.  We partially line the inside to keep the weeds out and retain some humidity.  They are then filled with a mixture of soil, compost and peat.  I use them mostly for lettuces and radishes, parsley etc as they are very effective at keeping out the bugs and the slugs.