Okra Leaf Cotton

I was taking my walk this morning and a friend stopped by the front fence.  Larry is my hay man.  I've been buying hay from him for nearly 20 years.  One of the nice things about long time loyalty is it runs both ways.  Even in this horrible drought year, I didn't think to call Larry until I only had 4 bales of hay left.  He had saved me hay because he knew I would be calling him and he was able to deliver it within a couple days of my call.  Now that's service!  When he delivered the hay, Larry noticed I had cotton growing in my garden bins behind the studio.  He said he has some interesting cotton seed to bring me.

This morning Larry gave me a small bag of cotton bolls that he called Okra Leaf Cotton.  I had to google it since I'd never heard of Okra Leaf Cotton.  Turns out it is similar to other white upland cotton but has a leaf that looks like an okra leaf.  With all due respect to the people of the south, I don't think okra is edible, wouldn't grow it and have no idea what the leaf looks like so I googled it.  Yes, Google got a bunch of my business today...

Here is a photo I grabbed off the internet that shows a regular cotton leaf on the left and the okra leaf cotton on the right.  Son of a gun!  It really does look like an okra leaf.  It's supposed to be great for letting all the pesticides get to the lower part of the cotton plant, particularly in areas where they spray 8 to 10 times during the growing season.  I don't spray pesticides on my very small cotton crop so that distinction doesn't really help me much but I love the idea of different shaped leaves.

When the ground warms up in the spring I'll be planting my Okra Leaf Cotton in one garden bin and some other cottons in other bins.  In the mean time I'll spin some of this up and see how I like it.  It's going to be great to compare them - both the leaves and the cotton.