29C and 100% humidity here just now - it feels like the tropics! I woke this morning to a solid fog, couldn't even see across the road, and it's the first time in about ten months that there has been enough moisture in the air to make a morning fog. We've had 40mm+ of rain in the last few days (coming up on 2 inches), and it's wonderful! Very strange. We don't usually get this in the Barossa, hot dry Autumns are more the norm. For myself I'm not complaining, never think it - this is wonderful for me, because my trees were dying from the prolonged drought, and now most of them aren't! I've lost a few trees, but most look as if they'll survive. I may even get a lemon crop this winter.
My shiraz-growing neighbours are most unhappy though - they're in the middle of vintage, and rain brings botrytis. It's already in the grapes. But the graziers love it. We were driving back home yesterday evening through an area where the ground has been stripped to dry pebbly soil and bedrock by a succession of droughts and fires, and all the paddock dams are gaping empty in surrounds of cracked mud. There's already a mist of green spreading across the ground between the rocks, and tiny trickles of water in the bottom of some of the dams. Hopefully there will be less need to handfeed stock this winter!
