Posted on 10/14/2011 5:20:03 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. The October weather here in East Central Mississippi has been nothing but amazing this past week. We have had a few rainy days that have helped keep my compost pile moist as I am still working on building it up. It is satisfying to see the steam rise from it when I give it a turn on these cool mornings.
If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just encouragement please feel free to join in and enjoy the friendly discussion. Our Freeper community is full of gardeners, each with varying interests and skill levels from Master Gardener to novice.
I hope all your Summer gardens did well this year and your Fall gardens prosper.
That is a recipe to drool over!
Thanx!
You can apply your calcium in a foliar feed and it won't wash away.
It is a good basic syrup recipe that can be used for so many veggies to pickle. My husband likes okra pickled in that recipe.
Anyway, when you get beneath the outward jungle appearance, there are bushels of green tomatoes! Some are large enough that they will certainly ripen before it gets cool, but there will be more than enough green tomatoes to make my DH's favorite relish to enjoy throughout the winter.
That’s just NOT RIGHT!!!
I thought Cotton came from the fabric store?
Just Kidding. I have never seen plants that uniform in height but I left the farm in 1951. My dad leased a place in 1946 or 47 and some of his plants were 5 feet tall. Of course we picked by hand in those days and we got over 3.5 bales on a few acres and averaged about 2 bales...
Let’s keep this tip just between you and I Blonde... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnBF6bv4Oe4
That is so cool.
you are amazing....
you are too kind!
So, I picked some of it and brought it home. Cut into it ... still looks like okra ... so I breaded and fried it. Tasted great.
DH and I have called everyone we can think of -- LSU extension office, old timers, other farmers -- to try to find out something about these unusual okra plants found in a very unusual place.
It isn't difficult to figure out how the plants came to grow where we found them. Obviously it was deer or bear that had eaten the okra somewhere and deposited it on the turn row. There are so many critter tracks around the farm, that it would be impossible to tell for sure. Coyotes are an outside chance, since they will eat almost anything if hungry enough.
Best guess so far is that the okra that was eaten by the animal was a hybrid and the resulting plants we found were throwbacks of some kind. The plants are big, strong and very pretty and definitely not spineless. These plants will leave you itching and stinging worse than any okra I've ever picked. I had to wear long sleeves, pants and gloves to get near the plants.
Since we cut the okra in the garden down weeks ago, we were very grateful for this gift from nature!
Forgot to mention that I saved many pods of seeds from the ‘wild’ okra, so that I could grow some next year. If anybody else wants to try some, let me know. I’ve got plenty of seeds to share.
Is it possible to trace the linage of your HyBrid from your main garden? It’s too cool to grow Okra here in Benderville, thank goodness
My initial reaction to finding the okra was trying to tie it to the cotton field, since cotton is a relative of okra. But that is far-fetched, and there were no okra plants found IN the cotton field, only on the turn row between the cotton and what was a corn field earlier in the year.
Nobody we've contacted has ever seen a relatively short, extremely large diameter, pod of okra. Some of these pods resemble short ears of corn they are so fat.
I always think about cotton when I see Okra plants. Did you defoliate the cotton for machine picking and if did how was the Okra spared?
Were you able to plant and grow some okra up there?
Yes, we defoliated the cotton. My husband is pretty good at not drifting chemicals with his spray rig. We had a field of cotton in another parish that we had defoliated via airplane. All of the trees around the field lost their leaves too. They aren’t dead, just def’d.
Put out 8 (4 of each variety) transplants; got 2 small pods. I’ll try again next year, as this season was far from normal, and not just for us; everybody I’ve talked to had a very bad year.
I hope those bean seeds I sent did better for you than they did for us, after I bragged on them. They weren’t alone though, as the Navy Beans, Black Valentines, Henderson Baby Limas, and Florida Speckled Butterbeans didn’t do worth spit either.
My “75 day” melons were green and rotting on the vines, rather than ripening, at the 100-days after transplant mark. Potatoes got late blight. Only things that did well were the pickling cukes, pattypans, peas, and onions.
It was a highly unusual season for everybody I've been in contact with -- from Montana to the east coast and everything south of that.
In spite of the horrible heat and drought, my scarlet hull peas and zipper cream peas produced heavily, as did my speckled lima beans. In fact, my lima beans started producing in early August and they are still filling out pods.
My cantaloupes on the trellis did very well, but all of my squashes were horrible and many died before they made anything. The cukes were okay, but nothing special.
There were so many things that I didn't plant at all. I simply couldn't imagine why I should try to grow something else when everything I had planted previously was struggling to make it.
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