Cotton, cotton, and more cotton!

Remember the cotton bolls I grew and harvested last fall?  Well, over the winter I "ginned" them by hand.....the pasta maker did not work, unfortunately..... and it is amazing how much cotton I now have from only 36 seeds planted last spring!  I will never ever need to buy cotton seeds again!

Cotton seeds from the 2013 harvest!

Here is my harvest of each of the four kinds of cotton that I planted:

This is the entire harvest spread out on my queen-sized bed, with cat and paperback book for comparison.
Keep in mind, I started out with only 36 seeds!

White.
I am not sure what type.  There are many and this one was
not labelled.

Sea Island Brown

Erlene's Green

Nankeen, not nearly the yield as the others.

I believe that I would have had a better yield of the Nankeen if I had not planted it so late.....several weeks after the others.  By the way, Nankeen cotton's color probably looks familiar to you.  It comes from India where it was commonly used for British soldiers' uniforms, and the name for those uniforms....."khakis"!  The draw was that it was cotton that didn't need to be dyed and it was cheaper than the white.  Because white cotton had a longer fiber staple and could be easily dyed in lovely colors, it was more expensive and desirable for commercial applications.

One interesting thing about my crop was that I didn't think what the outcome might be by planting the green, white, and brown right next to each other.  I watched the bees go in and out of the blossoms, still not realizing what might happen.  Then when I started "ginning" the cotton bolls, I noticed that cross-pollination had occurred, most evidently with the green and brown, which bloomed after most of the white had already started making bolls.  I saw several shades of brown that had crossed with the green, and many more shades of the green that had crossed with the brown and the white.  You could identify each of the crosses as either mainly green or mainly brown, and the green with brown was definitely a different color than the brown with green.  A blue-green and a reddish brown were also noticeable in more than one boll.  I saved some of the seeds of each color variation to plant for further exploration.

In this enlargement of the photo of my green cotton, the different shades of green are quite evident.

The ease with which the colors cross pollinated is why in some states and/or regions where white cotton is a commercial crop, you are prohibited from planting colored cotton.  Keep this in mind if you are thinking of planting cotton in your garden.  You can find out by simply calling your local extension agent.

Picking the seeds out by  hand was an adventure. The Sea Island brown was the easiest to pick, then Erlene's Green and the Nankeen.  Hardest of all was the white, which wanted to hang onto the seeds for dear life!  

You can see how relatively clean the Sea Island seeds are compared to the others.

The length of the staple was different in each variety as well.  The green and white were the longest, with the Nankeen being very short.  Not sure if this is due to my late planting of it, and therefore less time to develop in the boll, or if it is just the nature of this variety.

Although not a great photo, this shows the various staple lengths of the fibers by variety.

I found the green to be the softest of all, with the white coming in a close second in this category.  All in all, I was most impressed with the green.  I will try the Nankeen one more season to see if I like it any better, however, as it stands now I don't think I will like it enough to plant more of it after this year.

This year I will plant the different colors away from each other to lessen the chance of cross pollination.  At the same time, I am going to plant the seeds from several of the cross pollinated bolls in large pots, again away from the others and each other.  I would like to see if, for instance, the blue-green is viable in the seed, or if it will just revert to the original.  I would love to develop a blue-green cotton!  I also like the brownish green and the reddish brown.  Could I eventually produce a cotton more red than brown?!  Stay tuned....I am loving these possibilities!  I am a sucker for genetics.  At one point in my life, a very long time ago, I dreamed of being a research biologist.....

I spun up some of my harvest just to see what it was like and below are some labelled samples.  I can tell you that, at first, I felt like I was spinning "string" and it was not very exciting after years of spinning other, more "interesting" fibers like wool, llama, yak, buffalo, or silk.  So, I decided to blend it with another fiber.... llama in one case, and silk noils in another.  I really liked the latter!

As I spun the different yarns, however, I began to have a better appreciation of spinning cotton.  It can, and sometimes does, seem like spinning string (especially with the commercially prepared top that spins very smooth), but if you relax your control and let the cotton do what it wants, then the most wonderful lumps and bumps, and thick and thin places appear, and it begins to take on a really nice character that only cotton has.  I became more and more excited with each of my samples as I saw all the possibilities of spinning with cotton!

I will be trying my hand at spinning cotton this spring and summer and will keep you updated.  I really want to spin cotton for several reasons:  I live in a warmer climate where wool really isn't practical for the most part, cotton is a common crop here in the South and I can easily grow my own cotton source, and I like a challenge (sometimes!). I am also drawn to it because it was the fiber that Gandhi (of whom I am a great admirer) spun on his charkha during his civil disobedience movement.  I spin my cotton right now on my Ashford Joy or my Ashford Traditional wheels, but I would one day love to learn to spin it on a charkha of my own.  It is on my Bucket List!

Cotton must be processed in a different way compared to other fibers that we spinners enjoy spinning.  I will outline those steps in a future post, along with some processing and dyeing tips and tricks!

If you would like to grow some cotton of your own, please email me a request at llama_mama@msn.com with "cotton seeds" in the subject line, and I will get some to you at no charge.



Spring seems to have finally gotten here, and I am standing in High Cotton here on HeartSong Farm!

I love dirt!

I am a farmer at heart. I know this. I have known this for many, many years…as a child even, before I knew what I was feeling.  An attachment to the land and its elements….its beauty, sounds, fragrances and textures. As a four year old, I enjoyed digging in the dirt in my Daddy’s vegetable garden, letting it sift through my tiny
fingers, enjoying the smell and feel, and marveling at how you could drop a tiny seed into a hole made with your finger, add a bit of water and in a matter of days there would be something green sticking its head up through the brown earth, seeking the warmth of the sun. My Daddy told me it was all part of the Magic of the Universe, part of God’s Plan. That he and I were witness to it together made it all the more magical to me.

I remember beans, peas, asparagus, squash, eggplants, cucumbers and tomatoes growing in those garden plots, and the summer supper table being set with the wonderful fresh bounty. There is nothing like a sandwich made with a freshly sliced homegrown tomato!

We also had a few chickens scratching around, providing us with eggs and sometimes meat. I didn’t care much for the smell of wet, burnt chicken feathers or the plucking, but the resulting crispy fried chicken pieces cooked to a perfect reddish-brown from the Crisco and cast iron skillet on the Sunday dinner table was certainly worth the price of the unsavory preparation. Chickens from the grocery stores these days do not taste like those free rangers did, and it is not just nostalgia telling me this.

And so, throughout the decades from then until now, I have longed to be settled on a farm and have a vegetable garden that would ultimately provide me with what I needed to live a healthy life. I moved around quite a bit during those years, but here and there I was able to work a garden of some sort into my life as well as chickens, guineas, ducks and geese. Those experiences served to reinforce my connection to the land and my desire for rural life and self-reliance grew to where it was becoming hard to contain it.

In 1998, I moved to my present home here in East Texas due to circumstances in my life that I had little control over, and I knew when the choice was made to move, it had to be to a spot where I could fulfill that desire that I had nourished all those years. I would put down roots at last and so I did, but still a full time job to pay the bills and taking care of my elderly parents, as well building a barn and fences and hand shearing upwards of 25 llamas some years, got in the way of any serious gardening until a few years ago when my son
and I built two 4’ x 16’ raised beds and tried out square foot gardening.

That was a great learning experience, but once again circumstances necessitated that I concentrate on other aspects of my life and it was not until this past spring (2013) that I was able to return to those two raised beds, pull a magnitude of weeds, turn over the soil with some llama “beans”, and plant a vegetable crop.

My veggies included crookneck squash, okra, cucumbers, Ichiban eggplant, bell peppers (red, green, purple and chocolate), Cherokee Purple slicing tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, and a several types of cherry tomatoes. I planted two basil plants, a little rosemary “bush”, and some oregano.   And I planted white, green, and two shades of brown cotton. Yes!  I might have been a bit more excited about my cotton plants, to tell the truth, but I can tell you that I ate a lot of fresh, grilled, roasted and sautéed produce over the summer months and into early fall!

Cotton plant seedlings in front, okra in rear

So why plant cotton? Well, I am a spinner and this year at our annual Wildflower Fiber Retreat we learned about growing and spinning cotton and were given seeds for white cotton and Sea Island Brown cotton to plant if we wanted to try our hand at growing our own spinning fiber. Many of those that attend the Retreat each year raise fiber animals like angora goats and rabbits, llamas, alpacas, and various breeds of sheep, but less than a handful had ever planted a cotton seed to harvest. And so, for me, the year of learning to spin cotton began in March, 2013, and included planting cotton along with my vegetables. If I was going to do it “right”, I wanted green cotton, too, and online I found Earline’s Green Cotton, and also some Nankeen Brown seeds to order, which I did without hesitation.

I planted about 5 or 6 white, 15 green, 10 Sea Island Brown, and 12 Nankeen. The latter did not do as well as the others because I planted them too late, I think, in a new bed quite a way from the others. Still I got a nice bag of lint from those 12 seeds. With the others, however, I got a bumper crop and I will never have to purchase cotton seeds again! I discovered that each individual boll produced about 20 seeds and each plant produced at least 12 bolls (all from 1 seed!). If you would like some, contact me and I will share!

Early bloom

Old bloom

Bees love the blooms

The plants and blooms are lovely. Cotton is related to okra, hibiscus and marsh mallow plants. The blooms start off white and end up pink, yellow or red before dropping. The bees love them, and the natural colors of the cotton lint are gorgeous! Cotton plants are frequently grown in pots as ornamentals and in the far, far South can even be perennials, but mine were victims of the first serious frost in early November this year.

Cotton boll forming

Cotton lint

Harvested bolls

Currently, I am spending the majority of my evenings during the week hand-ginning my cotton bolls and looking forward to spinning the lint...maybe even dying some of the white.  Next year I plan to expand my cotton planting to several new beds in various places around the farm. I need more practice with spinning cotton!