Florida Snow

Isn't this beautiful? I think this is the prettiest cotton field I have seen.

I dub it "Florida Snow" :D. I just wish you could have seen it in person. When we drove by the next week, they had the cotton piled into 21 truckload bundles! That's ALOT of cotton!

When the cotton reaches maturity, I believe they spray it with a defoliant to remove all the leaves. It sits for a couple of weeks until the get these big combine looking creatures/machines and sucks up(I think) all the cotton. It gets bailed into HUGE retangle shaped cubes...3/4 the length of a semi trailer, but just as wide.

Here's a close up of it. If you don't know what you're doing when you pick it, you will have bleeding fingers in no time. The part of the plant (would you call it the hips?) that holds the cotton on the plant has sharp burs on it.

To learn more about cotton, go here...
http://www.cottonsjourney.com/Storyofcotton/default.asp
and this one...
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/clothing/cotton.htm