I’ve been growing okra in my garden for a few years now.
I’m not sure why.
The blossoms are pretty, as above. And my wife likes it, so it satisfies the prime directive for vegetable gardening (grow what you’ll eat.)
But as a food source? What a waste of space.
I started with Clemson Spineless, the perfect okra for people who lack the courage to try something else. I went on to grow Heavy Hitter, touted as a super-productive okra with multiple flowering stalks per plant.
Either way, I ended up with plants that didn’t start blooming until they were four or five feet tall. And then, from a row of ugly seven-foot-tall plants, I consistently got a yield of around 0.5 pods/plant/day. Which stops completely, well before the end of the growing season (Post G22-061, September 24, 2022).
If I had to survive off okra calories, I’d need to plant a couple of square miles of the stuff.
Upshot: After growing it for few years, I thought I knew okra pretty well. Lowest-yielding plant in my garden.
Jambalaya Okra
This year I decided to try Jambalaya okra. This is a relatively new variety that gets a lot of on-line praise for being early and productive. A simple search with Google shows me two different professional growers, in hot climates (Georgia, Texas) that describe it as “the most productive okra that they have ever grown.”
Yeah, well, I’ve read stuff like that before.
Some of the descriptions sounded like outright fantasy. In particular, some sources said it would start producing okra pods from plants just one foot tall.
Yeah, uh-huh. Sure thing.
But this past week, well, that turned out to be true. I spotted an okra blossom on a plant that was way, way too small to be producing fruit. Then, damned if they all didn’t start blossoming and setting pods.
There they are, above, with a Sharpie in the picture for scale. Neither of the plants above is a foot tall yet. But there they are — blossom on the left, pod on the right.
This is an F1 hybrid, so you can’t save the seeds for next year. Each year’s seeds have to be produced by specifically cross-pollinating the two parent varieties. They are priced accordingly, typically around 20 cents per seed, in small quantities. (Versus something like 3 cents per seed for Clemson Spinless).
I haven’t picked a pod yet, but this is already looking way better than any okra I’ve grown in the past. Qualitatively different. I have a second set of seedlings, ready to go in the ground, using seed from a different supplier. So I’ll see whether I just got lucky, with the first set of seeds, or whether this okra really is as early and productive as this first batch suggests.
Any lesson here?
This is shaping up to be the second time this year where a previous under-performing food plant surprised me.
Earlier, it was Snowbird snow peas (Post G23-017). Until I tried that variety, I always considered peas to be useful for filling garden space until it got warm enough to plant something productive. This year, by contrast, all said and done, I got just over five pounds of snow peas out of roughly 16 square feet of garden space. Didn’t even need a trellis.
Now it’s Jambalaya okra. Getting down to business way earlier than any okra I’ve grown before.
I guess the lesson here is that the most important part of gardening is selecting the right varieties. I’m no better at growing peas this year than at any time in the past. And okra pretty much grows itself, no care needed. The entire increase in yield, between prior years and this one, was in stumbling across the right variety.
Who know? Maybe somebody has bred a tasty kale, and I just need to find it.
Edit Fall 2024: Two years later, and I cannot sing the praises of Jambalaya okra enough. This year’s plants are still producing heavily as of 9/20/2024. This, following weeks of high production.
To the point where I don’t think either my wife or I would be upset if okra season ended soon.
The upshot is that I’ve finally found an okra that’s not a waste of space. Based on my limited experience (Clemson Spinless, Heavy Hitter, some red okra, some Burmese okra), I doubt I could find a higher-yielding okra than Jambalaya. Nothing else has even come close. My conclusion is that if this is an average season, 20 Jambalaya okra plants provide enough okra for two people. YMMV. Here in Virginia, USDA hardiness zone 7.
