I recently made a post about organic cotton clothing for babies and children sold by a locally owned store.  I noticed that the post received a comment about the Hemp v. Cotton argument. 

Hemp is a crop that is getting some attention because it requires much less water than cotton and it does not deplete the soil as cotton does.  The challenge in using hemp as a fabric is that it is more expensive to produce in the spinning process due to its coarseness.

It looks like there has been some positive movement in hemp textile production during a recent trial which combined hemp with Crailar organic fiber.
Crailar is a traditionally spun yarn using bast fibers from plants like hemp.  The combination could be considered as a replacement for
cotton. 

According to hempnotes.com, hemp yarns were spun at North Carolina State University using
fibres made with the ‘Crailar’ enzyme process to produce soft
textiles made from hemp and bast in a recent trial.  The fibres were actually spun on conventional cotton equipment.  The website quotes Tim Pleasants, Spun Yarn Lab Manager for NC State University, “[...]
This is the first time in my 23-year yarn spinning career that I have
seen hemp processed on conventional cotton spinning equipment.”

If you'd like to learn more about the trial, read here.

In reporting on a story about gardeners in western Wake County that runs tomorrow, I came across a funny story that didn't make it to print.

On suggestion from a reporter, I had walked a block from our office to a thriving garden on a corner lot, where Betty Ross just happened to be weeding. I told her I was looking for gardeners to interview and we got into a conversation about her own garden and how she always had one while raising her family in Cary.

Betty told me that one time - this was back in the 1970s - someone had given her then-young son some cotton to plant in the garden. Tended, it grew. But somebody who knew a bit about cotton noticed and Betty soon had the N.C. Department of Agriculture knocking on her door. Apparently, you can't just decide one day you'd like to grow cotton. The reason: boll weevils.

The pesky little beetles, which migrated from Mexico, had infestated our nation's cotton crop in the early 20th century.

In Betty's case, it was determined that she could keep her little cotton plant, but it was inspected regularly for boll weevils.

Betty told me that the plant was such a curiosity in the neighborhood that neighbors came by to look, and her son took some of the cotton to school to show his classmates.

Incidentally, a federal Boll Weevil Eradication program that was started in 1978 has been quite successful.