Finnish summer

Last summer our balcony looked very different. In fact you could hardly walk there because of tons of stuff that were on their way to the city dump or then were still being used in the "remontti". This year it still houses an old vacuum cleaner :) but otherwise it's now cleaned it's act pretty well. Now there are lovely yellow, pink, blue, white and red flowers courtesy of my wonderful mother-in-law.
The thing about a Finnish summer is that it may not be very warm - although this one has been warm enough - but it is always green and blooming.
A million Finns - or something to that effect - own cottages and pretty much return to nature as the first warm spring days roll around in early May. Those of us who don't own cottages usually have friends and family willing to invite us for a visit or two and it really doesn't feel like summer until you've bathed in a proper sauna and grilled a sausage or two by the water front. Could not get my body convinced about swimming though. The temperature had gone down from 19 to something like 16 or 14 C and it was FREEZING!
In our case summer is also about helping at the father- and mother- of-law's farm. Husband having grown up there does quite a bit. I, the city girl, get to join with the cauliflower planting. It isn't hard as such but requires dexterity of fingers and good nerves as the small plants have an exceedingly annoying habbit of getting tangled with each other. I'm not quite sure how many got planted this year - I only had a chance to help the last time around - but last year I seem to recall it was 30 000 plants. They say it's not a lot but I beg to differ :).