It's About Cotton Pickin' Time!

We waited all summer for this!

He's getting positioned...right after grazing the power line to the house.

We've been watching the cotton grow from just a small plant (maybe a foot tall by the time we moved down here) to almost 4 feet tall and very healthy by the end of the summer.  Then they came over a month ago and sprayed it with defoliant to kill the leaves but not the bolls.

Recently it's been raining every couple or so days and they haven't been able to harvest.  As we watched the cotton sag on the plants and begin to drop off, we wondered if they were ever going to pick it.  A lot of farmers in this area don't have their own harvesters and have to rely on others, and their availability, to pick the cotton for them.

They actually started picking the cotton down the road yesterday, moving to the field behind our house last night.  What??!!!  We waited all summer and halfway through the fall and they're going to pick cotton at night?  When we newcomers can't see it?  Needless to say, Neta and I were not happy with this schedule.

We had errands to run last night and when we got home we could see the ghostly outlines in the moonlight of the bales in the back field, but at least the cotton in front of our house wasn't harvested yet.  Whew!

This morning, around 10:30 (farmers apparently keep easy work schedules -- I want to be one!) the combines showed up for the front field.  The first one entered the field, but the second one had something sticking up from the top and it hit the power line coming into our house.  It didn't knock it down, but it caused it to spark or something, setting off Sammie on a barking binge and causing just enough of a power flux that our internet router reset, in the middle of a client call that Neta was on (she uses a fancy Voice Over IP phone).  Internet outage by farm equipment.  That's life in the country.

But finally...we got to watch them pick cotton.

About time!!!

Here's something I did not realize about harvesting cotton.  Unlike picking corn, they strip the cotton from the plant, but the plant remains (somewhat) standing.

Oh yeah...and I know some of you may wonder if Neta and I are going to try to grow cotton -- as a hobby crop - on our farm, the answer is probably not.  You cannot grow cotton, not even for fun, in the state of Georgia without a permit.  You can thank Mr. Boll Weevil for that!


Here are a few other pictures from both the front and back fields showing the bales.

That's a lot of t-shirts!

Bales as far as the eye can see

Bringing it home!

This brings our curiosity about cotton farming to an end...until next year at planting time.