Weather in OrchardyHaven

Thanks to the Permaculture Association for this link to Weatherspark.com. You can get all sorts of information, but I didn't expect to be able to find weather data so close to Sadowo (it's actually from Grodno airport, 50km away).

Here's a graph showing the average temperatures through the year, in comparison with Wakefield:

A few things jump out. First, I've stupidly cut off the x-axis, but it starts at the beginning of January and ends at the end of December. The Wakefield data is is blue, and the Sadowo data is grey. The thicker horizontal grey line is zero. From the beginning of December to early March the average temperature in Sadowo is below zero, in fact for two months the average high never gets above zero! By contrast in Wakefield the average never gets down to zero. From the beginning of April to the end of September though the average temperature in Sadowo is higher than Wakefield.

There are also graphs of wind (much higher on average all through the year in Wakefield), humidity (higher in Wakefield all through summer, similar in Winter), and cloud (seems much cloudier in Sadowo).

To have a look for yourself, here's a link to the weather data charts for Sadowo.

Where in the world...?

For some reason I always thought Poland was in the cold North of Europe. This prejudice was strengthened when I found out about the weeks or months of -20C in winter. In fact, I was surprised to discover our new smallholding is just over 7km South of where we live now in Wakefield, W Yorks - and 1645km East!


As you can see from this picture, all of Scotland is more Northerly than the most Northern bit of Poland, and the South of Poland is more on a level with Brittany...

Luckily even in the cold winter the sun often shines, and in the summer the continental climate should mean we'll be baking nicely - in fact traditionally most families had outdoor 'summer kitchens' to avoid the heat of cooking warming their houses too much.


Here is a clip from the Google satellite image of the plot itself:

Our house and buildings are in the centre.

Our Eastern and Southern boundaries are easy to spot - the treelines.

Our Western boundary is closer to the buildings - it goes to just before the narrow strip of cultivated land.

The Northern boundary is less distinct and less straight, but it's roughly marked by the big tree or clump of trees just about due north of the buildings. There's a 'wet patch' in amongst these trees to the North, which was a small stream when we were there in April, although probably dry in the summer.

500m West is the start of a big forest (not visible in this image), 1.5km wide at this point and stretching down 24km South (and then linking in to other bigger forests...). On my first walk into the forest I met some Elk, which was an amazing experience!

What's in a name? Orchardy Haven...?

We were looking for a name for our future home that would be somehow poetic and evocative of the kind of place we wanted it to become, and also to have a sense of where it is now...

So, it's in a small village called Sadowo. This in itself doesn't mean much, but the root 'sad' means 'orchard' in Polish. If you add the suffix '-owa', this turns is into an adjective, 'orchardy'. So far I must admit the 'orchard' there is a bit old and in need of some tlc - there are about 20 apple trees, and quite a lot of raspberry and blackcurrant growing around. Here's a picture showing part of it: looking towards the house, facing north. It will get more orchardy soon...

Then there is the 'haven'. Of course since the place is in Poland, the Polish name came first, which is Sadowa Przystań. Apparently this meets all my poetic and romantic criteria, and a haven or przystań is a shelter, a safe place, resting place, a place to pause and re-energise.

We hope it will be a pause from the more complicated city life we've been living. We think the pace of life will be slower there in some ways, even though there's lots of work to do. We believe that it will be a place where people will come and eat apples and sit in our garden (after a few hours voluntary labour) and feel inspired and re-energised and relaxed...