While my friend was out of town, I cut the okra in his garden, all the while getting 30 or so pieces a day from my little okra patch. Then my friend got home and someone gave him two bags of okra so he shared one with me. There was enough okra in the one bag from his friend to fill all four trays of the freeze dryer.
I love the really small pods to boil in peas – that’s one of my favorite ways to eat okra but I always let my pods get larger because that’s more okra for later.
There were enough small pods to fill three tray and the ones that were bigger, I sliced for the fourth tray. We will not run out of okra this year!
Deb says
Boy , I’m jealous. I live in Idaho and have a hard time growing Orlando. It takes all season to get 1 tray
Judy Laquidara says
My guess is that you have a much shorter growing season than we do but I could be very wrong. Not sure any of this will help you but in Texas, our soil was so alkaline that plants had a hard time absorbinb any nutrition from it so we had to work really hard to get it to grow. Once we came upon the right combination of soil treatment and organic fertilizers, we had the best okra I had ever seen. The last year we were there, we were begging people to take okra because I just couldn’t process it all quickly enough. If you have a county agent or if you haven’t had your soil tested, I would recommend that if you really want to grow it.
For about 8 years in Texas, my okra would get about waist high, produce a few pods and that was it. The last year, Vince could barely reach it and we finally just forgot about it because we had put up so much and it just kept producing. Good luck!
BTW, if you can get it to producing, it should produce til a good, hard frost and then . . it’s gone!