Starting a Cotton 101 Series on the Blog

I thought I may need to warn a few of you…. I have a lot of cotton content building up in my head (on my cameras & harddrives too!). And what’s worse is I’ve convinced my niece who’s living with me to join the cause (I hope it is voluntary on her part, read this to understand). Last weekend we spent a few hours at a friend’s farm. We’ve gotten started on some things to post but expect a lot to roll out next week! In fact, she’s working on a blog post for Monday about her first farm experience.

Photos and video are a crazy reality in my family. So if I was shooting video, she had my DSLR. If I was shooting the DSLR, she was probably shooting video. Yes, we took plenty of time to just soak it up too, but I think she enjoyed capturing the day, crop, equipment & people as much as I did. Well, except I really enjoyed sharing it with her. So maybe my day WAS better.

To whet your appetite, here is one of the photos she snapped and picked out. It is a close up of a cotton boll. There are a few key parts of cotton bolls (if I get anything wrong here, I trust someone will help me get it right) that we started our day talking about:

• The part that holds the seed & lint onto the plant, you can see it separating two separate tufts, that is called the bract. Earlier in the season, that provides the protection for the fiber as it develops & matures. At harvest, they are tough like tree bark and can cut up your hands if you aren’t careful.
• The fiber grows in 4-5 small tufts called locks.
• Each lock contains a few seed and the lint is tightly attached to that seed.  You can feel the see in there pretty quickly.

I hope you are ready to come back & catch the rest of the posts in the Cotton 101 series.  If you’d like to know when a new post goes up, you can request email be sent to you (promise the email address is guarded) by subscribing above right or by entering the RSS into your reader.

If you have any cotton questions, PLEASE SPEAK UP! I’d love to answer any questions that are out there.

(Anytime you see the Cotton 101 logo above, you can find any posts on the topic as the photo is hyperlinked. )