... so don't plant it alongside edible plants.
In retrospect, my chief mistake with my cotton patch was to mix in some cayenne plants in the raised bed. That meant that when the aphids struck, my options were limited because I didn't want to put any poisons on the peppers. Had I planted nothing but cotton, I might have terminated the aphids with prejudice and a good dose of insecticides as well. Instead, I had to fight a protracted campaign against them and their ant allies.
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| Still, the cotton bolls are forming. They're like massive popcorn kernels about to pop. They are hard and dense. Knowing what's coming, I figure the cotton that emerges will be pretty large. I can't wait. In the background, you can see some of the cayenne. |
In the end, the ladybugs didn't do a complete job or maybe the aphids had even more insect allies, ones the ladybugs didn't want to eat. I had to spray down several of the plants with Safer Soap. It's allegedly non-toxic, but it means I'll have to thoroughly wash all of the cayenne peppers before I process them into Catican Bayou Hot Sauce.
Well, it look to me like your cotton plants are overall OK. The thing about insects eating plants is, below a certain threshold the damage is pretty much cosmetic, and doesn't have that much effect on the plant's productivity. I've seen estimates as high as 30% leaf loss before the damage starts noticeably reducing yield. As long as you don't have one of the pests that actually infests and directly damages cotton bolls, you are probably getting as much cotton as you would have gotten without the aphid infestation.
ReplyDeleteAnd in some cases, early damage actually makes the plant more productive. Like when I was a kid, and the cows got out one night and started snacking on the sweet corn plants in the garden (which were less than 6 inches tall at the time). We caught them before they got halfway down the row, and the ones they ate were nipped off to just about an inch above the ground. When harvest time rolled around, the plants that had been nipped all had 2 or 3 ears of corn, while the un-nipped ones only had 1 or 2. By an interesting coincidence, at about the same time Farm Journal had an article about doing that to corn on purpose, and they also reported a significant productivity boost.
Not to mention the grapes. We've been pruning the grapes very aggressively every year, to the point where any rational person would think that we'd killed them, and they just keep coming back even more vigorous than they were before pruning.