Sometimes the questions that get asked leave me to pause and ponder. That’s exactly what happened when someone on Quora requested my answer to the question, what does cotton feel like? When I first saw it, I thought it was a bit absurd to ask. Then again, I routinely quote Cotton Inc on “the touch the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives.” So I let it bounce around in my head for a while and while I’m still not sure I gave the answer the person posing the question was looking for, I gave my answer! Am making some minor changes and posting it here in part because if you have an answer, I’d love to hear it! May even make it a guest post!

The first thing that come to mind for me is cotton feels like home. It is my go-to for comfort and I can make that work on so many levels.

The feeling of cotton can change based on the way we process it.

• For the flannel sheets that I snuggle into on a cold winter’s night, cotton feels soft and fuzzy, like it is waiting for you to come to bed when you get there and like it wants to hold onto you when the alarm buzzes.
• Cotton pjs feel like encouragement for taking a lazy Saturday after you’ve been running hard for a couple of weeks. They offer the perfect buffer between you and the sofa that’s been calling your name.
• The best pair of jeans or denim jacket feels like a friend who’s willing to help you get the job done. It is strong enough to take a beating without ripping the fabric (at least most days!) but soft enough that your body welcomes it whether you pull them on tight or baggy.
• My favorite Pima cotton v-neck t-shirt feels light and airy. It is the perfect thing for a hot day or a day when I will be running around a lot and want to still look a tiny bit more polished.

Cotton on the farm, has a different feeling all together. There are a lot of sensations.

• The plants are tender, seemingly fragile in the early part of the season. The leaves cool to the touch, even on a hot day as they turn the water the roots mine and sun shining down to photosynthesis and respiration waiting for the sun to go away.
• As you get to the middle of the season and plants have been growing strong, you realize those leaves are smooth on top, but can vary from smooth underneath to pretty hairy, something that surprises you. You see and touch delicate flowers, that dry-down faster than flowers we buy or grow to decorate our homes. So they start smooth and tender and within a couple of days, they are dry to the touch and crinkle in your hands.
• Later in the season, you can feel hard bolls on the plant, feeling fiber so tightly packed in there that the plant is ready to burst. And once it does burst, it is among the softest fibers imaginable. As you grab the open boll in your hand, it is both soft as the fiber is incredibly fine and comes from the seeds which are firm.

Not sure that is what a Quoran was looking for but it works for me!

[clickToTweet tweet=”Starting to wonder how I’d answer this question — What does cotton feel like? ” quote=”Interesting question and not sure about the answer… may have to give it some thought!”]

The post If asked, what does cotton feel like? How would you answer? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Not sure how I lost track of this post about two cotton bolls. I started writing it in the fall when my friend Robyn of Robyn’s World first flagged me about a tweet she saw from Tara Ziegmont of Feels Like Home blog. Seems Tara had a small cotton boll from a plant her family grew and wondered what had happened.

Here’s the photo and text Tara shared:

Joe grew cotton in his #backyardgarden this year. Cool crop, though I think we may have left it on the plant too long.

A photo posted by Tara Ziegmont (@feelslikehomeblog) on Oct 25, 2015 at 2:09pm PDT

The conversation on twitter about what happened included a few thoughts about why the lint in the boll looked so hard. Was it left on the plant too long? Was there something else happening? I mentioned heat units and realized I may need more than 140 characters. Months later I’m finally writing them!

Noticing/Diagnosing the Problem

Tara said Joe had cotton in their garden — that’s a unique thing to grow in Pennsylvania! My bet is there aren’t a lot of consultants in the area and I don’t recall seeing any book on how to grow cotton in a garden since it is generally grown in larger fields. That makes troubleshooting harder than it tend to be in other crops where lots of information is available.

When Tara & Joe saw the boll, they wondered about the problems there could have been with harvest timing. When I saw the photo, I had a totally different look at it — I thought about the summer.

Comparing to Other Cotton Bolls

Tara said they had about half a dozen cotton bolls on the plant but the one in the photo was best. Having tried to grow cotton when I was in New York, I remember that feeling of success from producing a boll. I noticed it was a lot smaller than the bolls I see in cotton fields. You can see the photo she sent alongside one from a harvest time day I had.

So the boll that Tara got is a lot smaller than most cotton plants produce and if you look at it, the hard, woody parts of the boll didn’t open too well and the lint didn’t fluff out. This video from several years ago shows an agronomist comparing bolls during a rainy fall. My amateur diagnosis from afar is the boll on Tara’s plant didn’t have a chance to fully mature.

A Good Start

A long tap-root is something cotton develops, which means planting the crop in containers isn’t the best way to grow them out. Soils for cotton should be light and well-drained like silt loam. While the plants need some moisture to get started, a lot of rain on small cotton plants can cause problems. Also, to make sure plants get a good start and keep growing, they run soil samples looking for key nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

How Cotton Plants Develop

While I’d love to pretend cotton is totally different from all others, it really isn’t. It is a crop that likes heat, we’ll talk about that a bit more later though. Cotton plants can keep putting flowers and bolls on for a long time because cotton is a perennial plant, we just grow it like it is an annual.

It is really important that the plant get the right nutrition, environment, etc when flowers start growing and as they continue to mature (that’s the plants reproductive cycle as this produces seeds). This video will show you the various points in the fruiting process.

What the video doesn’t show is the seed inside the lint. See, seed is what the plant really wants to produce, so it puts energy there and then from that, is where the lint comes. So let’s look at what cotton bolls need to develop well.

Good Pollination

In the video I show the white flower, how the white flower begins to pinken up and how it became a bright pink. I have to wonder if Tara’s plant got really good pollination. Sometimes flowers don’t produce much pollen for one reason or another. Sometimes rain washes pollen away. sometimes it is so hot, the pollen doesn’t dehiss (pop open). The plant needs the pollen to get to the ovary which is at the base of the flower. You can see in the flower at left that the stamen are holding on to that pollen. Later that afternoon it should have dropped to the base of the flower.

Hot, Dry Weather

Cotton is a Southern crop in large part cause it needs lots of heat and sun. In fact, there is a way of calculating heat cotton plants need (DD60s — degree days based on 60 as a minimum).

The extension service provides the how to calculate DD60s as a mathematical equation:

((Max temp + Min temp)/2)-60

Example: A day with a high of 90 and a low of 60 would accumulate 15 DD60’s. You add up daily DD60s to determine the heat unit (DD60) accumulation for a given period of time.

The plants need 130-160 days and 2200-2600 DD60s to produce cotton bolls. You can see where your plant is in the growth and development cycle and those all match up to the photos of what a cotton plant looks like.

The seed and lint inside the boll mature and will work like Jiffy Pop popcorn in that foil package. It puts pressure on the boll walls, which begin to dry down. If you look at the video, cotton bolls go from green to a burgundy when it starts drying down then it cracks open and as it continues to dry, it will continue to open up. If everything goes perfectly, you have a bunch of bolls that look like this.

My Diagnosis

So, with all of that said, I think the photo Tara had shows a few things…. 1) that pollination may not have been complete, leaving the boll somewhat hollow, 2) the fiber in the boll didn’t have a chance to fully mature due to either nutrition or heat deficiencies. After checking with several others, there seems to be a consensus that those may have been the primary factors but of course it’s much easier to diagnose knowing more details!

Hope this Helps!

Not sure this is exactly what may help Tara & Joe figure out what happened to their cotton bolls, but hopefully it will help them this summer if they try again. If there are more questions, feel free to leave a comment so I can pull together a followup if there are enough questions.

The post Cotton Bolls — What makes this one so small? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpSNK7UbRmg]

So the reality is, I was so excited to finally get Alicia into a cotton field at harvest, that I was giddy. You can hear it at the beginning of this video. (Yes, I resoundingly admit to being an agnerd.)

But seriously, having had cotton as the focus of so much of my work over the last mumble mumble years, and having not been able to really share that with some close family members due to the long distances…. well, it was long-awaited and did not disappoint.

Talking through the look and feel of the plant — seeds in the locks, some immature fiber that would make for a question if there was much of it (and there wasn’t) and basically getting set for a day of fun. I hope you enjoy the video.

This is part of my Cotton 101 series. I feel like I need to put a disclaimer here, I really enjoy cotton & have worked with it a long time but I’m not an expert. I just know experts (farmers, physiologists, consultants, etc.) I hope you enjoy what I’m doing, if so, subscribe via email above right.

The post Cotton 101: First Field Basics of the Boll appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

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. )

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