Russia's dacha gardens feed body and soul

Sales of vegetable seeds are up 40 percent over last year, potatoes by a whopping 200 percent, says Andrei Tumanov, editor of Vashi 6 Sotok (Your 600 Square Meters), Russia's leading newspaper for serious gardeners. "The more potatoes people grow, the worse things are in Russia," he says. "That's practically a statistical law."

Russia's hidden food power?

The idea of a dacha – a country cottage – is familiar to any reader of Anton Chekhov's stories about 19th-century life in Russia. But it only became a mass phenomenon in the 1970s, when the Soviet authorities began distributing small parcels of land around big cities (typically 600 square meters, or about one-seventh of an acre) as an inducement to urban workers to grow for themselves some of the foodstuffs that the official economy was poor at providing, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, and berries.

Though the state never published any hard figures, experts say that, by the late Soviet era, as much as 90 percent of the country's fresh vegetables, as well as significant amounts of meat and dairy products, came from "unofficial sources," meaning dacha gardens and the small private plots that collective farmers were permitted to work in their spare time.

"The Soviet leadership had the brilliant idea of handing out plots of land to keep people occupied with feeding themselves," says Mr. Tumanov. "Since then, we've gone through a series of crises in Russia so terrible that, if they'd happened in any Western country, they would have triggered revolution. But not in Russia, because people had their little pieces of land, where they could grow food and keep to themselves. And that system still works."

Threat from Canada?

Kolbetskaya certainly keeps busy tending her garden and puttering about with the endless construction of her little cottage. Though she's chairwoman of her village cooperative this year, she says there's little time for politics. "We would like the government to build a decent road to this place, but local authorities don't seem concerned," she says.

Though it's just a couple hours' drive from Moscow, life in Krasnoye has a remote and timeless quality that tends to blunt political inquiry, she says.

The most exciting development in her patch this year, Kolbetskaya says, is that a Canadian beaver has taken up residence in the tiny creek behind her cottage and has created a minor flooding danger in one part of her garden. (Experts say a silent invasion over the past three decades by Canadian beavers – apparently an aggressive species – has relentlessly displaced the indigenous Russian variety.)

How does she know it's a Canadian one? She points to a solid dam of sticks and mud backing up the creek, and a moundlike wooden lodge. "Our local beavers live in holes in the ground, but the Canadian ones build things. Like me," she smiles.

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