hoping for an idea on my okra problems, but i'm aware okra is (quite
rightly!!!) not particularly popular, so maybe i'm whistling :-)

had 8 plants, & all but one were pretty healthy & grew to the appropriate
height, etc (one was stunted). all had loads of flowers. what i found over
summer was that as each flower fell off, the bud, instead of growing on into
a pod, would just shrivel back to the stalk as soon as the petals fell off.
over all of summer, dh got, iirc, 3 pods in total :-) the plants would grow
& flourish & continue on regardless, but all covered in withered knobbles on
dead stalks. ;-)

one thing i did notice about them was that black ants (the slightly larger
kind, about 4mm long) were terribly attracted to the flowers. other than
that, nothing odd to report. i think it might be too cool here for them
really (i had a notable lack of success with my watermelon too - they simply
just never got ripe) so perhaps that is part of the problem?

when i pulled the okras out today, i did notice that the roots were all sort
of lumpy & gnarly & twisted, a bit like pictures of clubroot on brassicas
that i have seen, but i don't know if that is significant because i don't
know what they're meant to look like anyway. :-)

thanks if anyone has any ideas.
kylie