Dry summer in Helsinki

Our weather folks have crunched the numbers.

Remember how I wrote about birches going yellow and brown, and fields being light yellow when they should have been bright green?

We got a whopping 35 mm rain in Helsinki from June 1 to August 31 this year. That's the driest since 1844, which is when they started measuring things. (Here are the numbers, in Finnish.)
It was the fifth warmest summer in Helsinki since 1829, and it just might have been the warmest - if early June had been summery warm instead of springy cold. As is, I planted out my basils after midsummer, cos it was too cold (with nights around +5 C or so) before that.

The dry meadow where I go pick a lot of things in late July and August has pretty much dried up with things being yellow and brown, and most definitely not green and pickable.

A very abundant nettle patch had dried up completely - it's growing on bare rock, and gets watered by rainfall. Only, not this year, cos it just hasn't rained. We'll see if that patch comes back next year.

In addition to small, large and enormous birches drying up and dying all over southern Finland, a lot of rowanberry trees have died and are all dark brown, and a lot of small and large pines have lost their greens as well. Many of the still green trees are so weakened by too little water that they won't make it through winter.

We're going to have to cut down a lot of dead trees next year, for firewood. It'll be better wood than the two dozen or so old dead trees we cut this year: most of that wood was too rotten for firewood and ended up on one of our bonfires. Only, it's been too dry to set fire to bonfires, too, this summer ...