|
May
Learning about life and gardening in Russia
I’ve traveled to Russia quite a few times over
the years and people there often ask me where
I’m from in the U.S. You might think the name
of our provincial flyover state would mean no more
to a Russian than it would mean to you if a Russian
visitor told you she was from Chelyabinsk Oblast.
But in fact, every man, woman, and child in Russia
has heard of Colorado, and the very mention of the
word makes them recoil in horror.
No, not because of John Denver. They love John
Denver over there. Even so, Russians associate
Colorado with the two most vile scourges ever to
invade their homeland, with the possible exceptions
of Napoleon and Hitler: the TV show Dynasty, and
the Colorado Potato Beetle. At first I
couldn’t understand why they would care about
potato beetles. The people I tended to meet were
city dwellers, not farmers. But like virtually all
Russians, they were also gardeners.
As I was happy to discover, one thing I have in
common with most Russians, in addition to liking
John Denver’s music, is a love of gardening.
If fact, I can trace my interest in gardening to
those early trips. As a young adult, I worked in a
Russian city, spent my weekends hiking and biking,
and bought all my food at the grocery store. My
Russian friends and colleagues were urban
professionals too, but they spent their weekends
growing food. Not in small backyards or community
gardens like we have in our cities, but at little
cottages called dachas. In the “green
belt” around most cities, hundreds of dachas,
each with a small plot of land, are packed together
into villages. Every weekend, countless urbanites
crowd onto commuter trains to get away from the
noise and heat of the city, relax with their
families, and most importantly, grow food.
Some dachas are large, luxurious vacation homes,
used by the party elite in the old days and
affluent “New Russians” today, but the
typical dacha is basically a garden shed with a
crude kitchen and a couple of cots. Instead of a
manicured lawn for sunbathing and frisbee, every
square inch (well, centimeter) is planted with
beets, tomatoes, beans, and other vegetables. And
when they’re not tending the dacha garden,
they’re strolling along the nearby hillsides,
foraging for mushrooms.
But mostly they grow potatoes, a delicious and
versatile crop that is the most efficient way to
produce a lot of calories. Perhaps not
coincidentally, they can also be used to make
vodka.
Hence the Russians’ grave concern about the
Colorado beetle and their suspicion that I was
somehow personally responsible for setting it loose
in their ecosystem. The dacha was the first place
where I experienced recreation as a productive
activity. Although they find time for eating
together, reading, playing guitars, and of course,
drinking vodka, I still found it exotic and a bit
sad (that’s an obscure pun, by the way,
because the Russian word for garden is sad) that
they spent their time off not playing like us, but
working in the garden.
Russians combine work and play largely from
necessity. In the inefficient Soviet agricultural
system, a huge proportion of the country’s
fresh vegetables and fruit came from individual
gardens. Grocery stores were mostly empty in the
old days and are filled with items many people
cannot afford today. So gardening at the dacha is
not just a hobby; it serves as an underground food
system.
The Underground has always been a big part of
Russian life. Whether seeking shelter from the
oppressive government or the oppressive weather,
the best and most interesting things about Russia
– dissident intellectuals, potatoes, art,
beets – tend to develop underground, staying
out of sight until conditions are right for them to
emerge.
The best Russian food certainly comes from
unofficial, underground sources. Potatoes and beets
are just the starting point of borshch, a cultural
achievement that is as good as The Brothers
Karamazov and only slightly less dense. Borshch is
a Russian word that, loosely translated, means
“pick everything in your garden and put it in
a pot.“ With its abundance of fresh, healthy
ingredients, it’s the bright spot in an
otherwise bleak culinary landscape of mayonnaise
salads, mysterious meats, and the official
“delicacy” Chicken Kiev, a fried chicken
bomb that explodes molten grease when detonated
with your knife and fork.
It’s a universal truth that homegrown food
is better than anything your can buy, so gardening
is becoming more popular here at home again. But of
course there’s nothing new about growing some
of your own food. People do it all over the world,
and most did here until a generation ago. My
parents grew vegetables in their backyard in the
1970s, not because they wanted to be
“locavores”, but because then, as now,
the only way to get a decent tomato was to grow it
yourself. Gardening wasn’t a hot trend.
It was just a normal part of life. That’s
what it has always been in the rest of the world,
where people don’t live-blog the germination
of their tomato seeds or send tweets about their
bean harvest. They just do it. Before I went to
Russia, I thought of gardening as work.
It is, of course, but it’s healthy physical
exercise. And spending time at dachas showed me how
fun and satisfying it is to provide food for your
family. Now I spend most of my free time in the
garden too.
But in all my years of gardening, I’ve
never seen a Colorado potato beetle. Looks like we
succeeded in sending them all over to Russia.
© 2011 John
Hershey
Other Father Issues,
Books
* * *
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen
their teeth. - Peter Ustinov
John Hershey
is a dad, a writer, and a lawyer (in that order).
He writes a syndicated biweekly humor column about
parenting and family life.. His columns have been
published or accepted for publication on websites
and in magazines around the world, from Maine to
Oregon, Colorado down to Texas, and down under in
Australia.
Blood, Phlegm & Bile:
Parenting with Humor appears monthly on
menstuff.org. But, why the gross title? Well, for
one thing these are three substances with which
every parent becomes quite familiar. They were also
called the "humors" by medieval scientists who
believed that the proportion of these bodily fluids
determined a person's health and temperament. So
it's a pun! A pun requiring a lengthy explanation,
but a pun nonetheless. E-Mail
Contact
Us |
Disclaimer
| Privacy
Statement
Menstuff®
Directory
Menstuff® is a registered trademark of Gordon
Clay
©1996-2023, Gordon Clay
|
