Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Old Cotton

 ... vs new cotton.

I just got back from what was effectively a full, 40-hour work week of driving and I'm beat. I went out back into my tiny cotton patch and discovered that a whole bunch of bolls had popped. My Red Foliated is the most active. It's a young, modern cotton. My Nankeen, an Antebellum heirloom cotton, is not far behind. It comes out brown. My Mississippi Brown, another Antebellum heirloom, is taking it's own, sweet, Southern time. 

I love my Mississippi Brown. It makes me smile.

I'm pretty beat and am smoking a chicken for one of our sons while I drink some craft beer, so a couple of photos is all I can do.

I hope y'all are having a great week. Enjoy!

Old, Nankeen cotton.

New, Red Foliated cotton.

6 comments:

Ilíon said...

Back when those brown cottons were grown commercially, did they bleach it, or was it used as-is?

Foxfier said...

Are you going to save the seeds?

Because if I remember right, cotton can cross-pollinate an insane distance-- as in, there are laws about where you can grow cotton because you can sabotage a competitor's crop really easily type insane distance.

K T Cat said...

Foxie, I'm going to save the cotton while I scratch my head and figure out if I'm going to do something with it. As for saving the seeds, I promise you, I will never grow cotton again. This was interesting, but not worth a repeat.

K T Cat said...

Ilion, they must have bleached or dyed the stuff to make all those wonderful fabrics. I'm not sure I'm going to learn how to do that, though.

Ilíon said...

C'mon man! Breed not only an ornamental cotton, but also some varieties that are naturally various colors.

tim eisele said...

Actually, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the whole point of growing brown (and other colored) cottons is that they are not white and so don't need to be dyed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_colored_cotton

They apparently don't have as good of mechanical properties as the white cotton.