Okra is one of the easiest crops you can grow in your vegetable garden.
You can plant okra in the spring and it will keep producing fruits all the way until
the frost comes. Okra is a very heat tolerant plant. It grows well during the
middle of summer and it doesn't require that much water. Okra is in the mallow
family which means it's related to things like cotton and hibiscus.
And if you ever look at the flowers on cotton or hibiscus versus okra you'll see a lot
of similarities there. Just like cotton, like I mentioned earlier, okra doesn't
require a ton of water. It also doesn't require a ton of
fertilizer, so it's a pretty maintenance-free plant once you get it
going. Okra is great to eat. You can cut it up and fry it. You can make okra and
tomatoes and pour it over rice or you can put it in gumbo like our friends
over in Louisiana like to do. Okra pods are best when harvested at about 3 to 4
inches long. If you let them get much longer than that, they can get kind of
tough and they lose a little bit of their eating quality. But at 3 to 4
inches long they're very tasty. They usually have to be picked or cut about
once every other day. Okra requires a soil temp of at least 70
degrees to germinate. You can start it from seed and plant it with something like
our Garden Seeder, or you can start it from transplants if you want to get a
early jumpstart on the spring growing season. We like to plant okra on double
rows. We've also done it in single rows
on drip irrigation sometimes. The double rows work really well if you're trying
to save some space in your garden and kind of get the most bang for your buck
out of a certain area. Around here the four most popular varieties of okra that
are grown are Jambalaya, Red Burgundy, Clemson Spineless and Cowhorn.
Now out of those four, our two favorites are the jambalaya and the red
burgundy but we've certainly grown our share of the Clemson Spineless and Cowhorn
over the years. The jambalaya variety is the best if you want to be
the first to market. If you want to have okra before anyone else does
going early in the spring, the jambalaya will definitely start producing okra
faster than any of the other varieties.
It will start making okra pods at even
around just a foot tall. The downfall of that is it does require a little bending
over to harvest it until the plants get taller, but if you want to be the first
one to have okra, the jambalaya is a great variety for you. The red burgundy
also is a great variety that we like. The pods on it are a little more slender
than some of the other varieties. Now the red color will go away once you cook it,
but the red color is very eye-catching if you have a market stand.
If you're trying to have something a little more eye-catching than the traditional
green okra, the red okra is a great way to go. The other kinds -- the clemson
spineless which is probably the most popular among most of the farmers around
here in South Georgia. That's what everybody has grown most of their whole
life. It has a little more rounded pod and doesn't have the spines on it. And then
you have the cowhorn variety which is an heirloom variety. And the cowhorn --the
benefit to it is you can let the pods get a little more longer before the okra
becomes tough and kind of inedible. As the warm growing season progresses
you'll notice that these okra plants can get quite tall -- some of them you know six,
upwards of seven feet. Some of the old-timers around here talk about how
they used to to crop the lateral stems on the okra. Now all that really does is
make the plants taller. We don't really believe in doing that. We believe that
the more leaves the plant has, the more photosynthesis can take place and the
more fruit production that will occur as a result. So cropping the leaves just
really makes the plant taller and doesn't make the plant any more
productive. So if you've been gardening your whole life or you just started
gardening, definitely give okra a try. It's one of the the most easiest things you can
grow in your garden, one of the most productive things you can grow in your
garden and it just doesn't require a lot of input.