The past month has been extremely dry here in Southern Finland (and still is, see largest farmer's newspaper from yesterday: https://www.maaseuduntulevaisuus.fi/maatalous/artikkeli-1.253995). This has posed challenges on our field experiments as well. For instance, we were hoping to try biochar effects on flax, but the crop is very sensitive to drought and after waiting for 33 days, there literally were just a few flax plants growing in between of weeds. So just today we resow that field to barley: the cereals have been doing the best this year, even though aphids are a threat there as well.
Interestingly, it seems that even after eight years since application of biochar to relatively high carbon containing soils, it still helps crops to strive better in drought conditions, see below.
