Last weekend as I drove through the Missouri Bootheel, I saw cotton fields at various stages of development. In fact, I found one field that had a lot of bolls on it and was still blooming too, so it gave me a chance to show a lot of the different stages of growth for cotton.
I hope some of you enjoy looking at the video, it sort of brings one of my top cotton 101 posts What does a cotton plant look like? into a state of motion.
Key Parts of the Cotton Plant
Cotton plants really are beautiful! There are pretty flowers and cotton bolls are absolutely awesome. Lots of people haven’t had the chance to take those plants in first-hand. So this video and post is a way to share that beauty with those of you who may not have plants within reach! So what should you look at on the cotton plant?
- White flower / white bloom — The first day a bloom opens it is white or a creamy yellow color. In the afternoon, the pollen is released and as it self-pollinates.
- Pink flower / pink bloom — Once pollinated, the flower begins to turn pink, becoming a bright fuschia in a few days.
Young boll — As the pink bloom dries down, the young boll pushes its way up, forcing the pink bloom to fall off as a tag. The boll continues to grow as the fiber and seed grow.- Cracked boll — As cotton fiber matures, cotton bolls open slowly as the bracts dry and separate.
- Open boll — This is the part of the plant that most people think of when they think of a cotton plant… it’s what we harvest. And it looks like the cotton balls in our bathroom cabinets.
Learn More about Cotton
There are lots of great sources of information on my favorite crop!
- I post things pretty often on cotton, you can see them through the overview of them on my Cotton 101 page or check out both the cotton category and cotton guest category on the blog. Some of my highest rated posts on cotton show what cotton plants look like, Things Farmers Think Through in Selecting Cotton Varieties, How Harvest has Changed in a Lifetime and A Working Cotton Dictionary (Words Cotton Folks Use that May Confuse Others)
- TheFabricOfOurLives website is a pretty great resource on the fashion side of cotton!
- A great resource for great technical information is Cotton Physiology Today, a series of newsletters by the Cotton Foundation about cotton plants and the management of them. The University of Georgia’s Cotton Growth & Development brochure is another great resource too.
What a great post. I may reblog this, if I can figure out how to do it. Well done!
Thanks! I have another video or two I shot that same day. They are still to come!
I can’t believe it; here in northern Michigan I have several cotton plants in my garden, and today I have blossoms on some of them! I have no aspirations of seeing cotton, but it’s been pure fun growing them from seed I picked up a few years ago in Arkansas!
Just awesome! We are getting ready to start harvesting, this just makes me want that day to be here sooner.
I love pickin time!
Cool piece. Thanks!
You are welcome 🙂
Our Farm City Week focus is cotton this year. I needed some detailed information in coloring for younger 4-Hers who will have a color sheet. The video is perfect. Thank you so much
Wow! Glad I could be helpful! I share cotton info on my blog in hopes people find it when they are googling! Having worked in the cotton biz for seemingly forever, I feel like I have a responsibility to be sure accurate info is out there. Glad it is being found!
Thank you for the blog I found me a young cotton field and thought it was a field full of flowers now I know a lot more. It really is cool
awesome!
I have had flowers and bolls on my two dozen plants since mid June. I have a lot of flowers and large bolls. it is now September and no sign of plants Dying or any of the Bolls opening. I am in Connecticut Is there anything I can do to hasting the process Thank you
Richard, Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner! My best bet is if you can do something to encourage more energy go to those bolls, it will help. The easiest thing would be since you only have a few plants, pull the new flowers off. That should allow the energy that would go to them, to go to the bolls you already have set and that you really want to open instead. Also, if you can find a way to help encourage heat, that would be good…. maybe a sunlight reflector normally used in the car directed to the plants…. and a little fertilizer like Miracle Grow couldn’t hurt. Would love to see photos too — maybe even get you to write a guest post! https://janiceperson.com/cotton/love-cotton-write-guestpost/
i have one cotton plant that has just flowered. the flower has fallen off and i am waiting in anticipation for the cotton. my husband suggested that i hook my sewing machine to it. ha ha.
it is an intriguing plant and i hope to plant the seeds.
Congrats! I hope the flower was pollinated & that you can see the boll forming, sometimes flowers drop without that due to stress or something. would love to see a photo you can email me at jplovescotton at janiceperson dot com
there is a hard brown ball underneath where the flower was so lets hope. i have my own native bees nearby so lets hope they did their job of pollinating.
Great! Cotton is self-pollinating actually so as long as it produced the pollen it should have been able to do the job. #fingerscrossed 🙂
i have seven potential cotton boles on the plant.so if they all cotton i will harvest them, spin the cotton and then knit, croquet or weave it.
i watered the plant with worm urine and plain water so i think that was right.
hopefully lots of seeds so i can replant and have more plants.
Worm urine?
Can a plant not produce bolls
The plants absolutely produce bolls! The process takes the summer but that’s the reason we plant cotton.
how we categories different cotton varieties?
i started with two cotton seeds and now have lots of backyard plants from which i have collected heaps of seeds and rolled the cotton staples. i now need a drop spindle to spin the cotton. i find working with cotton very therapeutic
and an amazing plant procedure from start to end.suzanne
This post may be of interest to it https://janiceperson.com/agriculture/ag-awareness/cotton-variety-selection/