Beginner Gardening: I need a little encouragement!, 1 by fiddle

fiddle wrote:
Cotton burr compost consists mainly of the hard shell "burr" along with some leaf fragments and bits and pieces of stem that remain after the cotton fiber is removed from the boll. When it ripens, the cotton boll will split open along four or five segments or carpels and dry out, exposing the underlying cotton segments called locks. The dried carpels are known as the burr and it's the burr that holds the locks of cotton in place when fully dried and fluffed, ready for picking. "Burr" gets its name from the sharp spines that form on the tips of the carpels.

Nowadays, cotton is picked by machines, and the machines grab a lot of leaves, the burr and stem residue. Most of the residue is stripped in the field, and anything remaining is separated from the cotton fiber at the gin. The burr residue is shredded and sold as compost. I get mine at Calloways, "Back to Earth" brand (BTE).

When I was a boy back home in Louisiana in the 1950s, no picking machines were available on the small cotton farms. We picked it by hand, very carefully, for two reasons: (1) low residue cotton brought a better price at the gin, and (2) those spines were really sharp.