Mykola Kanishevsky (Landscape)

Mykola is confident that his houses will continue to sell well. He told me what differentiates his designs from the other houses that are sprouting up in the Kyvian Suburbia. Front yard. His own house is set back from the road. It is the third house that he has built. All of them have had this design. The other two sold within a day of going on the market. I took this picture from his second floor balcony. You can see the parking spot for his truck (on the close side of the fence) as well as parking for guests (on the far side of the fence). The garage for their own cars is off to the left of the frame. Mykola was also proud of his fence. It is not an impenetrable brick wall of the style that is more common right now. His fence has brick posts, but the area between them is fairly open.


The back yard is very small. He put all the land in front of the house so that it will be in better proportion with the house. The main sightlines out of the house go towards the front lawn, directly to the land that he can control. Behind him are houses that are built in the current traditional style: heavy cinderblock monstrosity.

The garden was a hot button issue for Mykola.

He love to cook and he wants to have fresh vegetables. He is also a life-long resident of Ukraine, where every family who had any possibility whatsoever, carved out a scrap of land and planted their own food. Each season the family would trek out of town to the 'dacha' or the 'horod' and tend the garden. After the harvest, they're would be the obligatory fury of canning and preserving. Once the bitter grey winter settled in, you'd eat out of the jar and pull your own potatoes off your city balcony. Of course, this didn't come from some Michelle Obama/Michael Polin (GET LINK)-inspired desire boost healty eating. It was a simple, cold calculation to just be able to eat. Too many times in the last century, food was taken away by war, by famine, by purges, etc. It was simply in everyone's social DNA that you had to grow your own food (or be linked to a relative who did). The striking thing about Mykola's garden plot is that it does not take up the *entire* acerage of his lot that is not covered by a building. He built a lawn and even a playground. He put his crops in planting beds that look like flower beds. Mykola told me that he recently built a house for his elderly parents in a town nearby. They moved from a village several hundred kilometers away to be closer to their grandson. His father wanted enough land to plant potatoes. His mother wanted chickens and a goat.Mykola said no. Картопля за мною. ('I am responsible for the potatoes.") He also promised to provide his parents with milk and eggs. What has all my work been for if I can't give my parents potatoes and dairy to last the winter. He is trying to transform his father from being a substiance farmer to a gentleman farmer of leisure. He wants him to choose to garden instead of being forced to garden.

(In contrast, in Frankivsk, we visited a home where the garden was every inch of available land. The owner knew how many pototo plants he needed to feed his family through the winter. He had beehives that made honey adn traded with the neighbors down the street for eggs.)
(Also in contrast, Yatsura's in-laws started their farm in 1991. It covers practically all of their land and they continue to harvest veggetables, fruits and honey as they live in the center of Kyiv.)
(Similary, Froliak and Soloviov have started a flowerbed-syle garden. They set aside a piece of their front lawn for fresh veggies. I doubt that they will do any canning this year.)