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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 22, 2020 13:47:31 GMT -6
Well, last night, I took a gamble and soaked about a hundred of my very best, Sky Rocket - Heavy Hitter Okra Seeds. This morning, I was up before the sun, busily poking them all into the ground. Shortly thereafter, we had a toad strangling downpour and now my garden is a big, muddy mess again.
Hopefully, the seeds were not floated out of the ground!
Only time will tell. This season has been a real challenge to work around. At least I wasn't skunked this time. In previous weeks, every time I'd break ground out there, it would rain for days on end, spoiling all my hard work, before ever a seed was planted. On the bright side, I don't think my garden has ever been so well aerated by repeated plowing. Maybe, it will turn out that all my efforts were not in vane?This is a photo taken during a break,(before it started raining) while re-rigging to pull plastic over my raised beds.I even got a chance to do a little weeding in my berry patch, that used to be a hog pen. This is the spot where I spent most of the winter picking up rocks, so I could mow this summer, but I couldn't stand the sight of all those weeds and ended up pulling them instead.I sure hope the bees find these blossoms before the heavy rains do.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 25, 2020 12:46:27 GMT -6
Thanks, Bon.
I stayed out past midnight, last night, with a headlamp on, cutting holes in my Plasticulture and planting Heavy Hitter Okra before the rains came. So far, I've only got one and a half rows of okra planted. I planted kind of wide between seeds, so they'll have room to spread out a little. Because of the wider spacing, there are only about 130 plants per row, where in years past I've planted as many as 330 Clemson Spineless seeds. The Heavy Hitter variety I've developed, takes more space than the old Clemson Spineless variety, because of branching.This is the zig-zag pattern that I use when planting my okra seeds in Plasticulture. There is an irrigation drip tape running down the center of each row, just below the surface, with a drip emitter every 12" inches. During really hot, dry weather in Summer, I water about 2-hours per night, until the dryer conditions improve. To check the moisture content below the plastic, I just poke my finger through it to gauge what's needed.I use a razor knife to cut an 'X' in the plastic for each seed. The holes have to be fairly large or they'll girdle the plant later in the season. The reason I use an 'X' pattern, is so the plastic doesn't 'flap' over and hamper the seed leaves from receiving enough sunlight as they germinate. As you can see here the Heavy Hitter Okra Seeds that I planted May on 22nd, are already breaking ground. These little seedlings, just now breaking ground, sure are a wonderful sight, after such a late start this year. It's kind of hard to imagine that these will be blooming in 55-days and will be producing their first pods by day 60.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 25, 2020 17:07:17 GMT -6
Farmer's Almanac Here is what the Farmer's Almanac recommends for the rest of the month of May:May 24th - 26thPlant seedbeds and flower gardens. Most favorable for corn, cotton, okra, beans, peppers, eggplant, and other above ground crops.
May 27th - 30thA barren period. Favorable for killing plant pests, cultivating, or taking a short vacation. May 31st Favorable time for sowing hay, fodder crops, and grains. Plant flowers. Excellent time for planting corn, beans, peppers, okra, and other above ground crops.
Maybe, someone out there can use this. It looks like I'll be rained out again for a good while, no matter what the almanac says to do, but if you have fair weather, go for it with all the best of luck this season.
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Post by macmex on May 26, 2020 6:16:37 GMT -6
Jerreth and I worked really hard over this last weekend and I managed to set up the rows for our sweet potatoes. Lord willing, we'll have about 30' more of sweet potatoes than every before. Just have to put down the drip line and plastic and then plant. That'll take a bit to get to, yet. When we do, we're also going to lay down our irrigation and plastic for okra. Really, the drip line and plastic go quickly at this point. It's just a matter of getting out there when it's not raining.
This weekend I also spent hours cultivating, planting beans and replanting beans (skips). Half of my Ajícito peppers are now in the ground and looking happy. Yesterday I finished preparation for planting the other half. Hopefully I can pop them in the ground this evening. We'll see. It's really wet out there.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 26, 2020 18:11:45 GMT -6
The mulch layer I've got can be ordered for the application of one drip tape or two. I've never had reason to use two drip tapes per row, but since they offer that as an option when you order your mulch layer, I suppose someone out there has a need for it? I've got plenty more drip tape on hand if you ever want to try two lines per row.
Sweet potatoes are consistently one of my most productive crops.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 31, 2020 14:31:11 GMT -6
Bon,
That's what I started out with, back in 1972. That's basically all any of us had back then. The original Clemson Spineless was advertised to produce 10 to 15 pods per plant, per season. The structure back then resembled a cane pole, having only one stem and zero side branches. (That's all we knew back when I was growing up). You would be lucky back then to get one pound of okra per plant, per season.
Now, through decades of hand selection, I never harvest seeds from any plant bearing less than 100 pods per season. It's crazy what a person can do, just by culling out the weaker plants and only saving seed from the strongest one each year. I would venture that a person could do that with any variety over a period of years, but when we all started buying seed from seed catalogs and purchasing seed packets from seed companies, all we got were 'run of the mill' seeds. They pick everything in the field, trying to make a profit. I only harvest seeds from my very best 12 plants. The rest gets composted.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 31, 2020 14:50:20 GMT -6
I just put my very best 102 seeds in a zip-lock bag with a wet paper towel to soak overnight. I sure hope I feel better tomorrow than I do today. According to the Farmer's Almanac, tomorrow, thru June 4th, is a very favorable sign for planting above ground crops, so I'm going to give it my best.
Usually, most of my planting would have been done several weeks ago, but this year, pouring rains and cold temperatures have caused repeated failures and several setbacks.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 1, 2020 20:39:16 GMT -6
I got 102 more okra seeds planted this evening. They only set on the wet paper towel in a baggy for about 24 hours and already had visible signs of germination. I think I have around 300 seeds planted out so far.
I've had so many deer walking on my empty raised beds, that several of the seeds are planted in the deer tracks that were left. (That saves quite a lot of time, not having to punch seed holes before I plant.) But it sure is aggravating.
I'll set out 100 more seeds tonight, for planting again tomorrow evening. I still have three or four more rows to go.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 2, 2020 19:16:46 GMT -6
My step-mom used to plant Clemson Spineless Okra on the 4th of July, just after we dug potatoes. She'd also plant it behind the sweet corn harvest and we'd have okra just coming on in September. It's not too late to plant okra, it's just too late to be the first to market with it like I usually shoot for.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 6, 2020 19:55:35 GMT -6
I am incurring a terrible amount of deer depredation to my okra patch lately.
After planting about 50 seeds in skips, caused by deer walking along my plastic, eating young okra starts, I stopped and counted 122 bitten off and uprooted okra plants in a single row!
That gets expensive very fast when you stop to consider each plant has the potential of producing 100 marketable pods for the Farmers' Market later this Summer.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 6, 2020 23:53:25 GMT -6
Bambi continually has the 'munchies' and his belly is an insufferable, bottomless pit!
I've had deer in the past to wipe out 10 rows of baby cucumber vines in one night as an appetizer, then come back for 10 more rows of okra seedlings, then grab a few sweet potato leaves and a couple of apple trees on the way out as dessert.
We've spotted as many as eleven does and three fawns in a herd out there, all at the same time. I once had over 1,100 fresh tracks in my newly plowed ground from one instance of deer depredation.
We've eaten a lot of deer over the years as a result, but they are persistent little devils and don't seem to take note of the reason for their continued demise.
I used to really enjoy seeing deer as they grazed across the place. They were so common when we first moved here that they could be seen wandering past our kitchen window morning or evening. They got to where they paid no attention to our dog and very little attention to us, but since I took up gardening beyond the reach of my kitchen window, they are not nearly as welcome a sight. They've destroyed more apple trees, pawpaw trees, mulberry trees, paper-shell pecan trees, elderberry bushes, and baby pine trees than a team of loggers.
So far, I've not personally witnessed them doing damage to any peach trees, which is sort of strange, because during the 2011-2012 grasshopper plague, those same peach trees were about the only fruit trees that were not killed by grasshoppers stripping off the leaves and tender bark; though, the grasshoppers did completely strip all the peach fruits, leaving only the seeds hanging from the naked stems.
I once had an Entomologist, from OSU take samples of the hanging, striped peach seeds, as evidence for his classroom back in Stillwater. He had never witnessed such complete destruction of a crop before. The grasshoppers would come in vast waves, stripping whole, ripe, tomatoes from the vines, leaving only holes in the Plasticulture where each tomato fell, where they would congregate in great hordes to sop up any remaining juices, until they had eaten holes completely through the plastic where each ripe tomato had fallen the night before.
After things like that, a few okra plants lost to deer overnight doesn't seem quite as overwhelming. I've had grasshoppers eat every bit of a row of corn, leaving nothing, save for the bare cob and the tell-tale sign of a stump where it once stood.
I've had them eat my Candy variety onions so far below the ground that all I found of them was the dried skins left in the depressions from where plump onion bulbs had been rooted the day before.
President Ronald Reagan once said," I love the Bible verse that says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I can’t think of a better description of what it takes to endure as a farmer. Buster, they're in a business that makes a Las Vegas craps table look like a guaranteed annual income."
He also said, "I believe that faith in God can carry us through all the valleys and mountaintops of life. That’s an especially encouraging word for farmers and ranchers as our work comes with more unknowns than most. Farm life brings both unplanned hard times and surprising, rich blessings. It takes faith to plant a crop without knowing what the weather or the markets will hold across the year and at harvest time. Faith to find the workers you’ll need in time for tending and harvesting that crop. And faith to pick up the pieces and start again in the face of trial and hardship."
Thank you, God, for being there for us, both in times of gladness and in times of trouble.
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Post by WD - Lawton on Jun 8, 2020 7:13:17 GMT -6
Well said, Ron.
Entire world needs more faith right now...
I just odered seed last night from you for SW OKLAHOMA.
I have faith they will do very, very well!
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 11, 2020 13:04:56 GMT -6
WD,
Thank you, for your seed order. I sent you a few extra okra seeds and a bonus pack of Roselle seeds too.
You can read about the Roselle on George's thread, over on the general board.
seedsavingnetwork.proboards.com/thread/176/roselle-jamaica-great-potential-gardeners?page=1
George is the one who got all of us started on Roselle. I've been trying to spread those around to anyone who will try them. They're a very giving and rewarding plant to keep around. They've become a staple in our garden ever since he introduced them to us a few years back.
I just planted about 200 more okra seeds last evening. I'll keep doing that until I have a decent crop or I run out of seeds, whichever comes first. Hopefully, the deer eating so many of my seedlings is just a phase.
I usually plant so many sweet potato slips that the deer kind of pass by my okra to eat sweet potato leaves instead, but this was a tough year for getting my slips to multiply, so they are in short supply. (The deer have kept the vines pruned back so short that the sweet potatoes can't do their job of filling in between my okra plants this year).
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 13, 2020 0:12:57 GMT -6
I finally got all of my rows planted with okra. I think I have 6 rows so far. Last year, I harvested 900 pounds of fresh, tender pods from only 3 1/2 rows. I've contracted to sell 30 pounds of seeds this Autumn if I can stand to harvest that many by hand. There are about 5,000 seeds per pound, so that's a pretty tall order to fill, just one pod at a time.
I've got more seeds soaking tonight, so hopefully, tomorrow evening, I can go back and finish planting the skips where the deer have been nabbing the seedlings at night. I had planned on saving one row for planting squash, but once I got started planting seeds every evening, I just kept on going until all the garden was taken up with okra instead.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 16, 2020 2:52:05 GMT -6
It's not too much trouble to care for until it starts producing pods. From that point on, it's an everyday job just to keep up with it. I try to schedule it to where I am not harvesting the entire garden every time. It's much more manageable if I can pick through half or less of the rows each day. (Be aware that if you miss a day of picking during this schedule, you'll be needing to harvest these 'missed' pods and discard them at the next scheduled harvest.
Sometimes, because of funerals, sickness, or other unforeseen event, I end up tossing more pods than I harvest. Some of my harvests exceed 100 pounds daily, so that oftentimes means that I will be discarding more than 100 pounds of tough pods. (These make good hog feed, if you know anyone with hogs). Otherwise, they are pretty much just compost and lots of it.
Being how much of my field is for seed production, I'll be able to let a good portion of it start going to seed, once I've harvested enough okra to promote good branching. Okra is lazy; if you ever let a pod go to seed, the plant will just stop producing, so, you've got to trick it into thinking it is under heavy predator pressure, by harvesting the pods almost daily and by pruning quite a few of the lower leaves (not branches, just leaves).
Once it sees that its first few dozen pods are not going to make any seed, it will double and redouble its efforts to produce more and more pods, as the season progresses.
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