Plant · P-970

Cotton Upland

Gossypium hirsutum

Upland cotton is a fast-growing frost-tender shrub grown worldwide as a warm-season crop for the seed fibre that surrounds its seeds inside a papery boll - the source of most commercial cotton textile fibre and a stuffing and cordage material in its own right. The seed itself is pressed for a cooking and salad oil once the toxic gossypol pigment glands have been removed by processing or bred out in glandless cultivars; the pressed seed cake then becomes livestock feed or manure and the stalks and gin waste serve as fuel. It needs full sun and well-drained soil of almost any texture from sand to clay at a neutral to mildly alkaline pH, tolerating drought and moderate salt once established but yielding best with steady moisture through flowering and boll set. It behaves as a perennial shrub in frost-free ground and is cut back hard or replanted where winters bring freezing temperatures.