I've grown it in SW Michigan.

It's fast-growing and seems to love heat but doesn't seem to be super-tender. Figure that it grows a little faster than hollyhocks. Start it so that you can protect it from frost up until planting -- maybe in a cold frame that doesn't go below freezing once it outgrows your indoor space.

The flowers are very pretty but in my experience really short-lived: enjoy them quickly in the morning. Mine were yellow but with a very nice pink-red flush at the base.

The flowers form pods which may or may not develop into fiber-filled bolls. A lot of them just look neat for a while and then may drop off the plant.

I got some to open up, but we had a long growing season last year. I'm hoping for better results this year because last year we were pretty droughty, but I don't know. We pulled the plants when frost was predicted and dried the whole things in our barn. My wife worked some of the individual bolls into wreaths; we'll try some of the whole dried plants with bolls at a farmer's market in Chicago this summer to see if any homesick southerners want a striking-looking remembrance.

Thanks Neil, that helps a lot! I thought it might be super-tender because I associate it with the South, but maybe that's just the long season needed to harvest a commercial crop.

I've avoided growing Hollyhocks because they're so susceptible to rust around here, but have a couple of New England specific catalogs with info about growing them: sow 8-10 weeks before setting out for Hollyhocks. I'll make that 6-8 weeks for Gossypium. Start the same time as tomatoes since Cotton tolerates cool weather better?

I plan to put up a temporary walk-in sized 'cold frame' using the south side of my barn as 1 wall. Unheated, but if a late freeze threatens, there is power for an electric heater.

Flowers best enjoyed in the morning? I'll site them accordingly.

Bolls in wreaths? Hmmm another project using the wild grapevines trying to take over my yard. Best wishes at the farmers' market and thanks for the great tips.

Ana

Hi, Ana. I grew up in the cotton growing regions of the south but it was only as an adult, living in the middle of Missouri, that I became interested in growing it. I am a spinner and acquired seeds of green and brown fiber cotton. I don't grow it every year, just often enough to keep my seed stock viable.

Cotton is a tender perennial in tropical climates. In commercial culture, it's treated as an annual, being killed by potent herbicides so that it will ripen all at once to facilitate mechanical picking. Due to a late frost in '92 that killed a number of my baby green fiber plants, cut worms that killed more and an early frost that threatened ripening of the seeds, I potted up my remaining 2 plants (three gallon nursery pots) one year and kept them in a cool sunny room over the winter. I cut them back and they survived a second season. Another year when we lived in Arkansas, a surprise early frost nipped the tops but the plants put out new growth from the roots in a long warm spell that followed.

When you start your seeds, put them into a fairly deep container as the roots develop faster than the leaves do. I used plastic fast food cups with good success. You are on the right track with starting them at the same time as your tomatoes. Your idea of the south-facing wall is a good one for the cotton.

The bolls with or without cotton make beautiful additions to grapevine wreaths. I've even seen scatter pins made from the empty bolls painted red with small yellow dots in the center to look like tiny poinsettia blooms--very clever, very pretty and they sell like hotcakes at Christmas.

I gave a program about growing cotton in Missouri during the '92 season to a fiber group and kept a copy of the hand out I gave the members. If you like, I can cut and paste it here or email it to you separately. Regardless, good luck with your experiment.

If you want to get a jump start on your growing season, you can try pre-germinating them. Take a cotton seed & place it in a baggie  then spritz it. It should germinate in a couple of days. It needs to be planted out soon after germination or it will mold.

Mogardener makes an excellent point about using deep containers. I germinate mine in a shallow pot but move them up to things that are 4-6 inches deep.

This is book-learning (or, more accurately, web-learning), but I think that what commercial growers use isn't quite an herbicide, it's a defoliant that doesn't kill the plant but redirects its energies from making new leaves and flowers into ripening the bolls it already has. If you have enough plants to experiment, you could physically remove the leaves towards the end of the season to try to achieve the same effect.

I actually like the foliage -- it's very much like maple leaves and gets tinged with red.

mogardener: thanks for info and offer to send handout. You have mail.

baci: I've done that when space was limited or testing viability of older seed. This year I'm winter sowing hardy plants outdoors, so I have enough room on my heat mat & humidity dome set-up to sow in pots.

Thanks everyone! Ana

I grew them last year for the first time here in z7 NC. By October, I had given up on seeing them burst open to reveal the cotton inside, but they did it in November! They require a long growing season to perform this trick. Hope you can have some success at it. They are fascinating. They get what looks like "limes" growing on them, which later dry up and split open.