Originally Posted by frarose

Ladies in the South use to put cotton with the seeds in quilts for batting. I was raised on a cotton farm in Southern Ga and at that time they didn't have the big machinery to harvest it. We started picking around the end of August as it opened up so we had to pick the same plants several times. I think now they wait until they are all ripe. My dad hired people and we picked. It was picked in a burlap bag with a shoulder strap and you dumped your full bag into a cotton sheet which was tied by pulling the 4 corners in. It was then weighed on a cotton scale and the workers back then were paid from 1cent to 2 cent a lb for picking. We kept ours in a big barn just dumped in there. Then when there was enough my dad shoveled it into the truck and took it to town to the cotton gin where he got paid. Don't know the process today.