Excerpt
April 03, 2011
There was a place along that great chain of absolute authority where I'd regularly witnessed a Protestant-level work ethic and widespread innovation--right at the bottom of the chain, in the private plots peasants were allowed to maintain behind their apartments and cottages. Those gardens were always pretty, adjacent tiny flags of green land, all neat, industriously weeded, with pampered plants and jury-rigged cold frames, the subject of lavish and constant hand labor. Produce poured forth--a third of the nation's milk, meat, eggs and vegetables, and sixty percent of potatoes and fruit came from the two percent of farmland in private plots. Peasants' evening labors on these private plots yielded far better crops than did their day labors in planned fields. And in adjoining sheds, peasants' private cows milked more, and their private pigs fattened faster. The privately tended vegetable gardens grew as gloriously as any behind a cottage in rural England or Italy. These gardens were glaring but unacknowledged advertisements against collective enterprise. Even before Andrea, they had been a much regulated embarrassment and a necessary source of sustenance.
