When you travel through Russia on your adoption trips you will see them: neat little garden after neat little garden, all laid out to take maximum advantage of the sun, which will soon begin beaming on them almost 24 hours a day.

Some of these gardens are attached to dachas, the country houses and plots given out to city workers in Soviet times to boost the nation's food supply. (I found an interesting piece on the history of dachas here.) Some are quite simply a country dweller's main supply of fresh vegetables.

I don't get Russia's white nights where I live, but I do have two boys who consume a lot of food, much of it with ties to the land of their birth. So here's what I'm putting in my garden plots this year.

Potatoes, cucumbers and beets, of course. I don't know that I could ever grow enough potatoes to cover my family's consumption of them. But in an attempt to do better than last year's meager harvest, I bought a cute kit of interesting organic varieties from Gardener's Supply. I really hope to get to northern Vermont this summer to see Gardener's affiliated organic farming teaching complex, the Intervale Center in Burlington. I had no luck with a so-called Siberian cucumber two years ago, so we switched to Burpee's "Straight Eight" heirloom. And the beets are an Italian variety called Chioggia, simply because I like them best.

What else? Several red currant bushes, meant to echo a smaller, but equally tart berry my little guy ate in Sakhalin. (They compete for space with nearly two dozen blueberry, raspberry and gooseberry bushes, and a similar quantity of strawberry plants. I said my kids like to eat, didn't I?) And eight tomato plants, half of which are cherry varieties. It cracked me up that Russians borrow the word for tomatoes from Italian and call them pomidori. And lots of garlic, which will likely be harvested early this year because of the mild winter.

We're also trying something new this year--sorrel, tart-tasting herb that grows all over the place in Russia. Anya von Bremzen, author of my favorite Russian cookbook Please To The Table, has a few interesting recipes that I've been eager to try. And there's always room for a row or two of experimentation in a Russian garden.