Cotton Seeds!

A few days ago, I had a sudden hankering to grow cotton. I'm not exactly sure what prompted this whim, but I think it was reading about knitting dishcloths, and thinking it wasn't too environmentally friendly if I was buying the cotton. Of course, as an alternative to buying disposable dishrags, it's great, but I haven't bought a disposable in years.

Anyway, back to the cotton. I looked around the web, but could only find one page about growing cotton in the backyard, this one. But it was enough inspiration for me to give it a go. But where to find cotton seeds? Hoping I'd be lucky, I posted on Aussie's Living Simply, and was lucky enough to get a few offers of cotton seeds. One lady has posted me some coloured cotton seeds (looks like brown, and a dark greenish colour), and I also had an offer of some white cotton seeds from the writer of the article! Small world huh?

My brown and green seeds arrived yesterday, and my daughter and I were very excited to plant them. Here they are with her holding them.

It's a little late in the season, but I'm going to give them a go anyway. We've only planted a small number, saving heaps of seeds for next summer if these don't go well.

I planted six seeds up in the back paddock, where our Biolytix wastewater goes, so they should have plenty of water. Planted 3 right next to the irrigation pipe, and 3 a little further away. On the off chance that they get too much water there, I popped 2 in the garden, but there isn't a lot of room there, LOL. Well, there is right now, but once things get growing, they'll get kind of crowded in.

Here are the 6 planting spots, yes, in the middle of the grass, LOL. I dug the holes with the grubber (mattock), put in some compost with the soil, broke the soil all up, then popped the seeds on top, then watered them in with some worm castings. When they start to shoot, I'll put some mulch around them. The soil here is pretty good already, nice and brown and soft, with lots of worms crawling around in it, so hopefully they will do well here.

While I was up there, I checked on the rosella plants. They're about 20-30cm high now, and already producing baby fruits.

And here are their baby fruits. Very small still, but hopefully in a week or two they'll be edible size.

For those that don't know rosella's, they're a hard spiky fruit that isn't really edible on it's own, but makes delicious jam, and apparently cordials. I'm counting on these to tide us over for jam until the strawberries start producing again next year.

The strawberries are going well so far though, they're producing runners like crazy, so we should have plenty next season. Still a few lone strawberries around, but not many now. The poor plants get most confused by this weather, it's hot as one day, then cool and rainy the next, so they seem to be continuing to produce past their normal season.

I'll be back later tonight for some more pics of the other stuff I've been up to for today. Stay tuned.