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Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Questions and Answers About Wild Grasses

The impetus to create today’s chronicle came from the website Quora.com, to which the Footloose Forester is a subscriber and contributor. If there is a life lesson in its timely appearance, the question posed by a purposely anonymous Quora subscriber is: people have questions…and other people have answers. 

It was a pleasure to provide real life context to the issue of land management in real time. The Quora question and the answer by the Footloose Forester are provided below.

Copy + Paste from Quora.com, as follows:

Dick Pellek

Former Forest Consultant at Pellek International Consulting20m

Is it right to uproot or cut naturally growing grass during the rainy season? Do wild grasses have any benefits?

Wild bermuda grass growing in an uninhabited area was uprooted and transplanted into an inhabited area that had a severe problem with blowing sand that impacted the people there. Was it right? This is not a rhetorical question. My answer is based on a true story.

The wild bermuda grass uprooted and sprigged into a nearby wartime worksite came from an unproductive sector of agricultural land nominally used to grow rice in Viet Nam. The worksite, a few miles away, was also situated on unproductive land, largely because of the expanse of hilly sand dunes. The site at Cam Ranh Bay was headquarters for a large contingent of civilians who supported US military operations, but the edaphic circumstances at their site were not ideal.

The transplanted and sprigged bermuda grass was 100% successful in stabilizing the sand by keeping it from blowing in the mess hall and living quarters. Was that a benefit to the hundred or so workers who lived and worked at the Pacific Architects & Engineers field office at Cam Ranh Bay?

Bermuda grass, up close

Since the wasteland across the bay near Dong Ba Tin from whence came the grass sprigs, remained a wasteland still with plenty of unharvested bermuda sprigs, and there was no appreciable loss of land value at that site.

This is not a fairy tale. The grass sprigging project was under my supervision. Further inquiries and comments are welcome.

Quora is a question and answer (Q&A) site that is a valuable tool in learning by asking questions, in the hope of getting useful answers.  For sure, some questions are inane, some are unserious, and some will never get answered.  But the subscribers participate because there are plenty of questions to which there are some answers, and a few answers that are based on personal knowledge or experience.