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Monday, September 07, 2020

In The End, It's Dry And Dead Anyway

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.

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.

4 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Imagine 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.

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  3. ♪♪ "See them tumbling down
    Pledging 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.

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