Okrapocalypse
For the past month or two, when I looked out my bedroom window in the morning, I could see a half-dozen okra blossoms. Every morning. They are quite striking, for a vegetable flower. They only last a day. And for the past couple of months, my row of okra set a handful of new blossoms and seed pods daily, just like clockwork.
A few days ago, the clock stopped. The weather finally turned a bit cooler, and I haven’t seen an okra blossom since. Zero. Production of new okra didn’t slow down. It ceased overnight.
Source: Weather underground.
Of course I knew that okra was a warm-season plant. Everybody says that. And the plants themselves are fine. Just no new flowers or pods. Our first frost date is probably at least a month away. So maybe if we get another warm spell, that will pick right back up.
The surprise to me was how knife-edged the pod production is, as a function of temperature. One day my okra patch was chugging right along. The next day, everything having to do with flowers, seeds, and pods had ground to a halt. All due to a roughly 10F drop in the average temperature.
By contrast, tomatoes and peppers are also warm-weather plants. But they’re still putting out flowers and ripening fruit. Albeit quite slowly, now that things are cooler.
And, of course, I’ve taken advantage of the cooler weather with a fall sowing of lettuce, spinach, and some beets.
So it’s not a total loss. Greens are food. Sort of.
But we do like okra in this household. It shall be missed.
Is this mother nature’s way of telling me to get a greenhouse?
At this point, I was going to go off on a tangent about degree days, and how those can be calculated specific to individual crops. And other such technical stuff.
But, in fact, one can just sidestep a lot of degree-day issues by growing in a greenhouse. Why be at the mercy of the weather when you can make your own?
In fact, when you get right down to it, this early end of okra production is just another example of what I observed last spring: It’s not very smart to provide frost protection alone, for plants (Post G22-009). Even if plants will grow in cold spring weather, they sure don’t grow very fast. By providing frost protection only, you go to a lot of effort to keep plants alive. But you get very little in the way of net production, because growth is so slow.
As exemplified by the 100+ days it took my 49-day early season tomatoes to begin producing.
Not that I regret that — those early-season tomatoes produced as advertised (before the 4th of July). They are still producing. But I bet they would have produced earlier still if I’d had them in a greenhouse. (N.B., tomatoes have perfect flowers (both male and female parts in the same flower), and can be pollinated just by flicking the flowers or buzzing them with an electric toothbrush. So no bees needed.)
I have resisted getting a greenhouse, for many reasons. Durable ones are expensive, cheap ones are just so much eventual landfill fodder. They require that you install irrigation. They require maintenance. And with common plastic greenhouses, you still need frost protection, as the greenhouse itself will typically do little to warm the plants at night.
Plus, they seem like cheating, for the home gardener. What’s the point of marking the passage of the year if you’re monkeying around with the seasons by installing a greenhouse?
That said, I already have irrigation set up (Post G22-037). Plus, I have a roll of clear plastic that looks like a more-than-lifetime supply at this point.
And I sure wouldn’t mind getting a little more okra this year.
Not to mention the pests. A greenhouse might keep the @#$@# deer out, so I could grow without setting up my backyard like an armed camp.
All things considered, I feel myself sliding down that slippery slope, from growing in open beds, to being the kind of backyard gardener who puts in a greenhouse.
I never thought it would end up like this.
(‿|‿)
But.
But what fraction of the slow spring and fall growth is due to temperature, and what fraction is due to reduced sunlight? Farmers around here grow their spring crops in poly tunnels, so I know it works. But I’d still like to know that split before proceeding.
Turns out, it’s fairly easy to get information on typical total solar energy by month. This is from the National Renewable Energy Labs PVWatts calculator:
Doing the math, you can see that over the course of the growing season, lack of sunlight is a trivial factor at the start of the growing season, but a reasonably important one by the end of the growing season. In October, my garden would get 30 percent less solar energy than it does at the peak of the summer.
Fair enough, that all makes sense. Lack of sunlight isn’t an issue for early spring crops. But for fall crops, a greenhouse might have more utility in letting existing crops fruit longer, rather than for growing new crops late in the year.
As I ponder my healthy-but-podless okra plants, I believe I’d settle for that.
