On May 5, 4:58 pm, "0tterbot" wrote:
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

Hi Kylie,
If I remember correctly, you're in Sydney. Is that right? We are near
Campbelltown and have successfully grown okra over the last two
summers, so it is unlikely to be the climate. As Dwayne said, okra
needs hot weather, but Sydney is plenty warm enough for it. For what
it's worth, the plants won't set fruit until it gets hot; before that
all the fruit fall off when they're tiny (or just shrivel into ugly
things).
In both years our okra has had aphids (and associated ants) in the
later half of the season, but that has not had much of an impact on
fruit set. Is it possible that your okra isn't getting enough
pollination? We find that honeybees and native bees will both visit
okra quite happily.
My veggie book says that okra likes quite a lot of fertilizer
(somewhat like tomatoes, but less than pumpkins) and even watering.
Our okra also has gnarled, ugly-looking roots and a surprisingly
shallow root system for such tall plants.
For what it's worth, my take on cooking okra is to follow the Greek or
Indian way of doing things - if you cook okra with something acidic
(lemon juice in Greek cooking or tomato and tamarind in Indian) then
it doesn't make that nasty, nasty mucous, but instead you end up with
a delicious and unusual vegetable.
Tish