It occurred to me as I was grafting the Howard walnuts that it would be a darned shame if somebody bulldozed the trees to build a house.
I know that it is impossible to control the distant future. Heck, I struggle to make my plans for tomorrow happen.
As I was grafting, I remembered that many of the houses...dacha...were VERY close to the road by Midwestern standards. Perhaps there might be something of value in looking at overhead images from various parts of Ukraine and seeing if there was anything useful to be learned.
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| Western Ukraine, near Slovakia. Houses fronting the street. |
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| Northwestern Ukraine, near Poland. Very large dacha (rich people). Front of house 50 from the center of the road. |
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| Northeastern Ukraine, slightly east of the Belarus/Russia junction. 70 feet. |
So, if a fellow were inclined to plant random fruit and nut orchards, he would be pretty safe if he were to plant the closest trees 100 feet from the road. Furthermore, if he deduced where the grade favored the entrance, he can confidently predict where the house will be built.
Back engineering WHY the houses are so close to the road. It snows in Eastern Europe. Shoveling snow sucks. There is a labor shortage in Eastern Europe. They are poor by US standards with 10% of the GDP/capita. They don't just order a snow-blower from Amazon (and blowing snow sucks, too). They don't call the concrete company and order 25 yards of concrete to pour a driveway.
Also, the space between your house and the road is vulnerable to petty theft. Closing up the distance and keeping the tools and gardens behind the house reduces the visibility and the theft.
Orchards
It takes orchards time to become productive. God forbid that we should collapse like Eastern Europe but imagine the good fortune you would feel if the plot for your dacha (lifeboat) already had a dozen fruit trees and a handful of nut trees that were already producing.
Bonus image
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| A composite diagram of what a typical dacha compound looks like. Source |
Very good points.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at old houses in the US, they are usually VERY close to the road by modern standards, especially since the roads used to be narrower - manual road maintenance discourages wide roads!
Jonathan
This is a very common configuration through out Latin America and other 'Spanish' colonies, too. I suspect it was evolved from the enclosed courtyards in large homes in Spain. The explanation I got from locals was based on control of access to the property and privacy in the yard (shielding it from taxes and jealousy effects). The house served as the front wall around the property - on the side most likely to be accessed from public areas. Many had one or two rooms on the front that were available for 'public' spaces - a way keep the public out, yet sell local goods, produce, food, or maybe serve as a little bar. (Been there in very remote Peru and Chile, enjoyed the beer.)
ReplyDeleteThose houses/compounds go back to Soviet times and/or czar times, so aren't most of them a sort of worker/peasant/serf housing for the local collective farm? It would almost be the equivalent of looking at the layout of slave quarters and subsistence plots on a plantation and thinking it had some sort of significance to a collapsed society.
ReplyDeleteOdd comment Rich.
DeleteWhat's odd? Do you know what the name Slav means?
DeleteIn the past, because of who was in charge they were limited in where they could live and build, so those limitations would play a role in how they laid out their houses, gardens and orchards as much as anything.
Looks like some well off Kulak farmer setup.
DeleteKulak
historical
A peasant in Russia wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labor. Emerging after the emancipation of serfs in the 19th century the kulaks resisted Stalin's forced collectivization, but millions were arrested, exiled, or killed.
Slaves I suspect had far poorer quarters and not much autotomy to have their own chickens, pigs and fruit trees.
Dmitry Orlov a Russian Engineer that worked in Boston for quite some time before returning to Russia wrote about how the summer vacation Dacha and the backyard gardens kept most Russians surviving the collapse of the USSR.
Dmitry Orlov's "Five Stages of Collapse" outlines a framework for understanding societal collapse, emphasizing financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural dimensions.
Worth a read IMHO.
Maybe not a cause back in the day, but utilities are way less expensive if they don't need a long run.
ReplyDeleteAlso, traffic noise and dust was less of a problem back then, and a chance to catch up with a neighbor going by may have been welcome.
Spain, Italy, and Portugal have very similary layouts. Anon is correct, based on what I was told by folks in Italy.
ReplyDelete