COCKSFOOT IN CITY STREETS

Southland Times, Issue 24000, 15 December 1939, Page 19

COCKSFOOT IN CITY STREETS

To The Editor

Sir, —Will you allow me in the interests of production, about which there is so much talk by the Government and public bodies, to say that I regard our City Fathers as culprits in spite of the energy they are displaying in filling up vacant areas with potatoes and other vegetables. They are doing this to the detriment of legitimate gardeners who in many cases have no other way of making a living. Unless they have unusually abundant crops and obtain top prices for what they sell the costs are going to seriously outweigh the returns.

In my daily walks around our very untidy suburbs I see heavy crops.of valuable cocksfoot growing luxuriously for tire want of better attention at the side of the streets. If this cocksfoot was allowed to mature it would be a gold mine for old persons and school children who could cut the seed and sell it for as much as sixpence, sevenpence or eightpence a pound. Last season I knew of one woman and two very small daughters gathering £lO/7/- worth from two lengths of different streets. This is only one instance among dozens of boys and girls who did very much better for themselves than running about the streets. It is fortunate that the seed is mature and of good germination before the reassembling of the public schools. Yet, sir, in the face of these facts, I notice our corporation has sent mowers up and down many streets leaving an untidy mess of grass which is no good to anyone as it is chiefly cocksfoot which is not very suitable for hay. From my own observation I am satisfied there are thousands of pounds’ worth of valuable seed allowed to mature only to be blown out by the wind or ruthlessly destroyed by our extravagant City Fathers. It is my belief that the value of cocksfoot seed over the streets and public roads of this end of Southland would treble all they are going to get out of their market gardening experiment. The cocksfoot scheme wants organizing, and rightly organized it would give employment to many unemployed men, for cocksfoot is one of the most valuable grasses we have for a certain class of land. So if it is really production the council wants why does it neglect and trample under foot a seed so much prized and grow vegetables that may have a very doubtful value in six months? If the corporation had both, all the better.—Yours, etc., CONSISTENT. December 13, 1939.