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  • Mother Earth Gardener

    GROWING NATURALLY Green Cotton

    Nov 29, 2019 7 minutes
    By Carla Tilghman

    AS A WEAVER, I have plenty of reasons to attempt growing cotton in my small, urban backyard garden. So I teamed up with Caitlin Wilson, a fiber-spinning friend of mine, and hatched a plot to grow naturally colored green cotton. Because we’re fiber fans, growing our own colored cotton was an appealing challenge.

    Such experiments never go smoothly at first, and ours was no exception. But regardless of the outcome, gardening trials always leave us with plenty of new information. And through our adventures, we learned a lot.

    COTTON CULTIVATION

    Cotton has been cultivated as a crop for centuries. Around 5000 B.C., civilizations in North, Central, and South America were growing cotton to make yarn and cloth. By 3000 B.C., several cotton species were growing in present-day Pakistan and India, as well as along the Nile River in Egypt. And by 800 A.D., cultivated cotton was grown in southern Europe. When Europeans moving to North America found cultivated native cottons, they adopted those species into their colonies.

    While we tend to think of cotton primarily as white, most cotton species come in several colors: green, brown, tan,

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