How to Grow Okra

Hi, I'm Jarrett from Stone Soup Farm, and this is how to grow okra. Okra is a heat loving plant. It is very intolerant of cold, and it can withstand absolutely brutal heat and keep producing. Best way to plant okra is in the spring, after any danger of frost has passed get a well prepared, well tilled soil, free of weeds, and plant okra one seed at a time, about one foot apart within a row, and maybe eighteen inches across the row. Once the plant starts to flower and produce fruits you want to make sure you only get the absolute most youngest fruits. You can see here that the color starts to change. These older ones are darker, and the younger ones are lighter. The way you can tell if okra is good is that if the tip breaks off easily such as that then that's still good. It's still tender enough to eat, and it's not going to be too bad. But these older ones; if you don't catch them in time they get really fibrous and really almost impossible to eat, and if you try to break off the tip of those it doesn't break at all; it just sort of smooshes. And this is going to be far too hard to eat and cut up. It's just not worth dealing with. So, you want to stick to these lighter colored ones that are near the top of the plant and what it's producing. Clippers are best because the stems can get kind of woody, but once you get that there's your okra. Again, okra is a heat loving plant, and it will thrive in the heat of the summer, and as it cools down it really starts to behave differently, and it gets tall like this, and it's not going to be as good. And as soon as the frost comes it's going to get totally wiped out, so get what you can before then. I'm Jarrett from Stone Soup Farm, and that's how to grow okra.