I've got lots of cotton bolls in my patch these day. They look like small tennis balls. They're very hard, suggesting that they will pop like popcorn. I finally looked up the life cycle of the cotton boll and discovered that very soon, my plants will be dry and dead. Dig this photo from a grown-up's cotton farm.
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| The leaves have all dried up and fallen off. |
This makes me wonder if there's a point to my continued struggle against the aphids. They're back as are their ant protectors. Following Tim's advice, I made my own insecticidal soap with ... wait for it ... dish soap and water.
True Story: I then looked around for a spray bottle with which to apply it. Annoyed when I realized we didn't have any spares, it took me ten minutes to realize I could use the spray bottle from the existing insecticidal soap. I told wife kitteh about my triumphant discovery and said, "The only problem is that I need to remove the "Insecticidal Soap" label and replace it with one that says, "A Different Insecticidal Soap."
At any rate, the plants are headed towards desiccation no matter what I do. The leaves on some of them have already started to dry up and fall off. I had attributed this to our current heat wave and the aphids, but I'm now betting that it's just the plant's natural life cycle.
When we visited New Mexico a couple of years ago and were out looking for gypsum crystals in a dry lakebed, we kept finding balls of cotton everywhere. They were blowing in the wind, and accumulating in low spots and brush like little tumbleweeds. It seems there was a large cotton field about half a mile away, and it had started shedding cotton bolls before it could be harvested. It sure looks like that is the cotton plant lifestyle in the wild: make a big fluffy ball of cotton, then die so that the boll can snap off and blow away.
ReplyDeleteImagine if sagebrush/tumbleweed had never been introduced to the Old West -- Western movies would have to use giant tumbling cotton bolls to achieve the "atmosphere" we expect.
ReplyDelete♪♪ "See them tumbling down
ReplyDeletePledging their love to the ground!
Lonely, but free, I'll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling cotton bolls..." ♪♪
Nah. It wouldn't have gotten any airtime.
LOL.
ReplyDelete