WHICH OKRA VARIETY IS THE MOST PRODUCTIVE?

so the last time on a video where I was talking about okra I mentioned that a lot of the old-timers around here call it oakri and I wasn't quite sure why and then one of our great viewers dropped some knowledge on me and said that oakrie was actually the original pronunciation of the word and that over time people started calling it okra so I'm going to do my best from here on out to call it oakri now on our seed packets and our website and stuff we'll still spell it okra but I'm going to use oakri from here on out just to be proper and it's been about a month a month and a half since we transplanted our okra in this plot here behind me we are doing a little bit of a trial this year planting several different varieties and kind of comparing them and so today I want to show you what they're looking like now they're just starting to produce and kind of give you some tips and tricks about growing okra and what you need to do with those plants as they grow and produce hey tiger can you say oakri you wanna look at the camera and say oakri tell everybody how to say it oakri no okay maybe next time so this is our 30 by 35 okra plot here in the dream garden we've got eight rows in here and five different varieties we've got these rows spaced I think I put them four foot apart yeah that's right and I got the plant spaced approximately a foot apart anywhere from 12 to 18 inches and all these plants here are just starting to produce and they're all anywhere from a foot to two foot tall depending on variety now if you don't know anything about growing oakrie you should at least know this one thing okra likes hot weather and it likes warm soils to germinate and we've had a pretty cool spring and if we would have direct seeded this okra we might not have had very good luck because the soils have been relatively cool for this time of year the nights have still been kind of cool and the mornings you know some mornings walk out the door with a jacket on it's just now starting to warm up but that's why we like to transplant our okra in the spring we can start it in the greenhouse where we can make those soil temperatures warmer with the green house and our heat mats and we can get it in the ground earlier and get it up and going a lot faster than if we were to direct seed it in the garden out here and there I go again calling it okra when I'm supposed to be saying oakrie I'll try to do better y'all anyways so this back here when we transplanted it and put it in the ground it was still kind of cool so it didn't really take off like it would if we were to plant it in the middle of the summer and when you have a cool spring like that even if you're transplanting your okra you subject to lose a few just because they don't take root as fast and that cool soil and that cool temperature outside so we did lose a couple you can see right there that little gap I lost one of my jambalayas and I lost one more on this row here but for the most part considering what we were dealing with we did okay you know we got eight rows here probably about 30 plants per row that's you know 200 240 plants or so to lose only about five or six I can live with that all day so we kind of had to be patient with it and took a little while for those transplants to kind of take hold and take root and start growing but within the last couple weeks they've really started growing and we're starting to see some production from our okra here so let's take a look at all five okra varieties we've got going here see what the pods are looking like see what their production is looking like early on so let's start over here on this end of the plot these four rows we've got our more heirloom or open pollinated okra so this first row of okra right here is our cow horn okra and let's see if we can find a pod that's getting ready here there we go right there so these cowhorn okra pods here you can let them get a good bit bigger than most varieties they stay tender at longer lengths they're also a lot more ribbed or have deeper ridges than a lot of other okra varieties and I was surprised at how quick these guys started producing in the past when I've grown these you know it might take them three foot tall or so before they start producing but a lot of these started producing at right around a foot tall which is always a good thing you know the earlier we can get okra the earlier we can start eating okra and seeing that cow horn okra start producing you know at that height only a foot or 18 inches tall tells me that transplanting has a big benefit not only can we get our plants in the ground earlier and let them start growing earlier but it seems like it creates some earlier production in the past when I've grown cow horn I've always direct seeded it and seems like that production is a little more delayed so transplanting has lots of benefits one of those being obviously as we've indicated here early production now on our second row here we've got our red burgundy okra and it's always easy to tell what's red okra because it's got those red stems on there now this one here is probably the last one to start producing we can see some little pods there starting to make there the other ones have already been making pretty big pods and this one just seems like it was the last one to go and not really sure why it's not like it was way far behind the others just maybe a few days or so but this is always a good producer for us and these pods are a little more slender than most okra and they stay pretty tender at longer lengths and this is really really productive one and it's always pretty to have some red okra in the mix and on the third row here is a variety that I've never grown before so I've grown all these other varieties in the past but I've never grown this silver queen okra and initially what I noticed about this one and you can see it's pretty obvious here is that they are producing bigger leaves and more plant foliage than any of the rest of them there's some huge okra leaves right here especially considering how young these plants are you see my hand there got a pretty decent sized hand you can see how big that leaf is there big as a lily pad so these are producing a lot bigger leaves a lot bigger plants and they're just starting to produce some okra this little guy here has already made one pod and there's another pod there and you can see that's a more lighter color okra has a real smooth texture doesn't have any ribs on it or anything and supposed to be really tender I haven't had a chance to cook any of these I've snacked on a few raw and they've been really tasty but interesting how much bigger the plants are on these compared to everything else and then on our fourth row here kind of our last row of the op varieties we've got our star of david and these have made pretty big plants too probably close to being quite as big as as that silver queen okra right there and these things are just starting to produce look in here there you see one right there so these make kind of short stubby pods they're really wide a lot of ribs on them and this is a perfect frying okra because you can cut some big old pieces on there all those ribs give it some nice surface area soak up all that cornmeal or whatever you use to batter them with perfect perfect frying okra right here with this star david now I've grown this one before and I know the production on this is not going to be what some of those others are but it's just a neat variety to grow the shape of it and like i said it is one of my favorite frying okras or oakries that there are and on these last four rows here we've got our home run producer hybrid the jambalaya or jambalaya okra and these plants are a little smaller now the transplants I planted for these guys were about half the size of that other tray I had so that's why the plants are a little smaller but they're really really starting to produce now and I'll show you the difference in production as compared to some of those open pollinated varieties so a lot of those op varieties you're gonna get one pod or so at a time when you pick them on these hybrids like this jambalaya here you're gonna be picking anywhere from two to four pods at a time so it just makes a bigger cluster of flowers there and you end up getting more production you can see there's two pods there that are ready to grab now the big difference with these is that they don't stay tender at real long lengths that's probably your ideal picking size right there about three three and a half inches long so you do have to pick these more often but you're going to get a lot more productivity out of these than you do those heirloom or open pollinator varieties out there just because you're getting a bigger cluster of okra there and you're picking more pods per plant each time you harvest so that's what we mean when we talk about the hybrids like the jambalaya being twice or even three times as productive sometimes as the op varieties you're just getting more per harvest now we still like those heirloom op varieties because you know we can let the pods get longer we've got some unique colors and shapes so that's why we're growing a little bit of both we can compare and contrast we've got our four rows of the hybrid to really give us some production for our market farming business and that kind of stuff but we've also got those other four varieties they're just interesting to grow and may provide some different taste or flavor profiles than some of the others so now that we've compared those varieties let's talk about growing okra and taking care of okra now we talked about the importance of transplanting in the spring and why we like to do that and besides you know planting okra too early which is kind of the one big mistake we see people making that are not successful growing okra you don't want to plant too early the second big thing is some people put too much fertilizer down before they plant and when you do that you're going to get all plant and no okra and I know this because I've made this mistake before you see okra doesn't need a whole lot of nutrients especially doesn't need a whole lot of nitrogen and last year for my second oakrie succession planting I direct seeded a whole plot of the jambalaya okra and before I did that I went in and tilled in a good bit of some chicken manure compost which is pretty hot stuff and what happened was my okra germinated well started growing well plants look good but I didn't start producing okra until those plants got about three foot tall three three and a half foot tall and I know from growing this jambalaya okra year after year it should start producing in about a foot tall so you want to be easy and not put nothing that's really high in nitrogen into your soil before you plant your okra now we don't fertilize our okra at all what we did here was we took some of that gin trash compost which has some nutrients in it but it's not near as hot as that chicken manure so we took that we tilled it in there and it seemed to give it just enough to get those plants looking nice and healthy at the beginning but we got our pod production early which is what we want to see if you got too much nitrogen it's going to delay that pod production because those plants are going to be just wanting to make leaves and leaves and leaves and not pods now let's talk about actually harvesting the oakrie and whether you should prune or maybe not prune those okra plants and when you're harvesting your okra like this cowhorn pod here that's about six seven inches long a lot of people like to cut it but some people like to just snap it off and you can snap it off sometimes and that's not gonna hurt the plant at all these plants are pretty resilient you just got to be careful especially when plants like this are small I have tried to snap them and end up uprooting the plant but if you want to snap them off a lot of times some will snap off better than others so let's see this one here that one snaps off a little bit but I did damage the plant a little bit there it'll recover and heal over not a big deal but you can see there snapping them off is not always the best way to go a better way to do it is to actually cut it that way you get a nice clean cut there and don't damage your plants and we carry this little tool here called a handy twine knife some people call it a ring knife some folks call it a ring knife I call it a handy twine knife you just take that little sheath off there and you got a little cutting blade there it's dull on the front so you ain't got to worry about cutting your hand or anything like that but you just come in here you can cut it off there you get a nice clean cut on your okra pods and now let's talk about pruning these plants here now you don't have to prune okra you can just let them go and you're going to get more production if you don't prune the okra and you just leave these lateral stems to grow out and they'll start producing okra pods too and you'll just get more production that way however it does require longer time to pick it when it is all branched out and you've got okra everywhere you kind of have to look for it fight through all this foliage here and so forth so it's just up to you however you want to do it now if you want all your okra pods just be kind of concentrated at the top here so you come in it's real fast and easy to pick it you can come along here as it grows and you can trim off these lateral stems here get this one right here and it's not going to hurt the plant at all it's right here heal over everything will be fine you'll get some good okra production up here and as you harvest the okra you can cut these lateral branches or limbs right here and just make for a nice cleaner harvest it also makes it easier to weed around these plants here so it's up to you if you want a nice quick clean easy harvest prune them as you go if you want big bushy plants they're going to produce more okra leave those there so let's recap here if you want early okra production you got to transplant it also don't give it too much nitrogen if you want it to start producing early at about a foot or two foot tall if you really want production go with one of the hybrid varieties like jambalaya if you like the neater coloration or you want to be able to let the okra get longer and you don't have to harvest it as often go with some of the heirloom op varieties if you want a nice clean quick easy harvest pruning those plants if you like big bushy plants with loads of okra all over them leave them be I'll put some links below to all these great okra varieties you can give them a try in your garden if you enjoyed this video make sure you give me a big thumbs up make sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell button so you get notified every time we come out with a new video and if you really enjoyed this video check out these other two right here videos I did in the past on growing okra I think you'll really like those as well we'll see you next time

Channel: HOSS

Views: 138,464

Keywords: okra, growing okra, okra varieties, Clemson spineless okra, cowhorn okra, Star of David okra, silver queen okra, jambalaya okra, heirloom okra, hybrid okra, best okra variety, most productive okra, when to plant okra, how to grow okra, okra spacing, okra seed, frying okra, boiled okra, best frying okra, how to cook okra, when to fertilize okra, when to pick okra, spineless okra

Id: hFFac1lg0OI

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020