We found a cotton field with ripe cotton balls and I've rarely seen the girls this excited about a crop. And they're pretty into growing things and get pretty excited about everything we grow. But hundreds of thousands of cotton balls growing on plants? This was unreal. They've obviously never seen ripe cotton before. They know we prefer cotton, hemp, silk, bamboo or wool for all of our fabric needs in this house. The latter 3 they know well. We usually raise silk worms once a year so they understand where that comes from and they know wool comes from sheep and bamboo is fairly self explanatory. It grows all over California and Japan and Bali and although the process of making something so soft and silky from grass that is more like a tree is even beyond my own comprehension, they know what it is. I didn't realize until we passed this field while driving that they'd never seen cotton. I'm not exactly sure how this got past me all these years either. It's very like me to have grown a plant of it in our garden or in the preschool- but I never thought of it. So here are a few pictures of our very happy lucky discover on our way to the local urban park- more on that tomorrow!
They both immediately went looking for the seeds within the plant so that we could grow it ourselves now. I just have to look up now if the little hard parts they found in the cotton actually are the seeds since I have no idea!
