It’s been a tough month in the UK: Lots of rain. Parts of Wales got as much rain last Thursday as they might normally expect in the entire MONTH of September! I saw these stories on the BBC and naturally I wondered how Scotland was doing. Turns out, the BBC has a weather web page where you can enter a post code and it will tell you the weather there. So I copied the post code for Bruichladdich (if you’re curious, it’s: PA49 7UN), and I now have an RSS feed for the weather on that part of Islay. So I have the current conditions at Bruichladdich on my iGoogle home page.

What has the weather got to do with barley? According to Bruichladdich’s blog, late last week all the barley farmers on Islay were working feverishly to harvest the crops that are ripe before a big storm that was due to hit last weekend. I haven’t yet heard how the harvest went…presumably either Bruichladdich’s blog or the Islay blog will bring us up to date.

As an aside: Many of the hurricanes that track up the east coast of the US get to the UK very quickly after they leave eastern Canada (as subtropical depressions, a.k.a. disorganized heavy rainstorms with lots of wind). I hope that the worst of these storms is over for the year, but we’ve got a while to go before hurricane season is over in the Atlantic.