Melancholy

... is the mood of the day here in the Catican Compound. We picked cotton today and discovered that our biggest Nankeen was now denuded of bolls. It was hoping to stick around, but we decided to pull it out. The cotton was a novelty crop. The real money maker was to be the cayenne sharing its bed, as it were. The cotton swamped the cayenne, both literally and figuratively - growing over the peppers and needing far more water than they liked. With the crop harvested, there was no reason to keep the cotton.

Still, it was good fun. I would never do it again, but I'm glad I tried it once. I still have my Red Foliated modern cotton and all of my fat, lazy, Antebellum Mississippi Browns. The Red Foliated is nearing the end as well. It's got six more bolls to pop and then out it goes. The Mississippi Brown is taking its own, sweet, Southern time.

I took a couple of shots of the Nankeen before I pulled it.

A nearly perfect Nankeen boll.

Only eight months old, the Nankeen had a sturdy trunk and was sporting new growth. There were even a couple of flower buds on it. That made me feel doubly guilty.

The root structure of cotton is pretty simple. It was a bit of a chore to pull, so I could imagine that it could survive the high winds of a small hurricane even if the leaves and bolls take a beating. Mississippi State suggests that 50-70 MPH winds are a problem.