We're getting rain--nothing too crazy though. I saw a hummingbird out by my tomato bed last night. I still get a little thrill when I see one.

Why did you have to replant your okra? I have several volunteers coming up because I left them in the garden over the winter. But they're Becks Big Buck...and my husband didn't care for it. Maybe we didn't harvest it right. Aspirin for a headache?

I just replanted Stewart's Zeebest, but I've never tasted a huge difference in varieties. My wife can't stand it boiled. The thing about okra, if you plant in rows, is that it separates something like potatoes from all those crops that can't abide potatoes. you are supposed to harvest okra when it's about 3" long

cochise, I'm sorry the rain has been missing you. Our rain has been hit and miss all year and I've had to water a little bit here or there, but not too much overall. Lately, whether it rains or not, we have been cloudy and cool and misty and neither the hummers nor I have been outside as much as usual.

We had tons of hummingbirds earlier in May, but since it has been cloudy, misty, foggy and cool for the most part for the last couple of weeks, it seems like they've been lying low. It also is possible that the females are in their nests hatching out eggs so maybe they aren't flying around as much as usual. There's tons of stuff they love in bloom in the garden, but they haven't been in there lately, though I have seen a couple out and about when the sun is shining and the weather is pretty. I miss the hummers when they're not in the garden with me.

The crabgrass is awful here this year too, and I've been weeding newly sprouting plants in the garden like crazy. It seems like every time it rains, more sprouts. I have about 80% of the garden clear of weeds at this point, but the 20% that remains is mixed flowers and herbs and too much crag grass. If I don't get that 20% weeded soon, the crab grass is going to win the battle for that edge of the garden (which looks nice from a distance until you get up close and see all the grass underneath the herbs and flowers).

A lot of folks in OK are reporting whiteflies on tomatoes lately so I guess it is just one of those years. I've only had whiteflies on my tomatoes once since moving here, and I hope I didn't jinx myself by saying that. When I go out to the garden today, whiteflies probably will suddenly appear out of nowhere just because I said we rarely have them here. You know how that goes.

I need to replant my okra too, but was thinking I'd wait until this constant rain passes on through. It isn't that we necessarily are getting huge amounts, but our May rainfall has been higher than average, and we've had constant fog, mist, dew, etc. that sits on the foliage of the plants half of every day even when it isn't raining, and all the plants (inside and outside of the garden) have all kinds of fungal diseases. You can't even really spray (and I'm certainly not going to try to spray a couple of acres around the house) because the rain just washes the fungicides away when it falls every few days. It is hard to get used to seeing diseases on the foliage of everything, including grass and weeds.

Hazel, I grow both Beck's Big Buck and Stewart's Zeebest, and like them both. To me, all okra tastes the same, so the difference is in the texture. Be sure you're harvesting it fairly small for the best texture. Also, keep it moist. While okra plants tolerate heat really well and is somewhat drought-tolerant, the okra pods themselves can turn woody and hard really fast if they are too dry while maturing. In the bad drought years, it is hard to keep the okra moist enough to avoid the woody pods. I use Stewart's Zeebest (or Green Velvet or any other variety I grow) for traditional okra recipes, but with the Beck's Big Buck, I like to slice it and roast it in the oven and then eat okra chips kinda like potato chips, but with less salt. I like my okra crunchy, not slimey, so generally I bread it and fry it if I'm not oven-roasting it.

Dawn

Okay...so it's normal to not replant okra? When y'all talk about replanting it, it seems like you're saying it normally comes up on it's own (from seeds that have fallen) It's coming up all over my garden--it and the jack 'o lantern pumpkins. (wrapped foil around their stems--that was a job.)

About the Beck's, Dawn, we were just so shocked by the size of it, we probably didn't harvest it soon enough. I really didn't know it was that thick. When I ordered it from Southern Exposure, I chose it because I had seen the name mentioned here. And it didn't easily snap off the plant, so it's probably like you said--it didn't get watered enough and got too woody.

Hope you got your rain, cochiseinokc! And that the aspirin worked.

We pull our okra plants at the end of the season. I save a few pods for the next years planting. We also tend to plow everything under after the season and then till again a couple of times before planting the following spring. I never have the last years seeds reseed because of that. It is normal not to leave okra stalks standing through the winter for me. I do plant clemson spineless every year. I pick it at 2-3" depending on what I'm doing with the okra. Pickling, it'll be a 2 incher every time. Freezing, canning will be a 3 incher. My stalks get at least 6 feet every year. One row produces more than my family of 5 can eat in a year so I end up giving a great deal of it away.

What I'm saying is that I planted okra and it was growing and then it started raining, raining, raining and all my okra disappeared. I don't know if the garden got too wet, but we've had about 7" of rain in the last month so that's a good possibility. It could have been a pest like cutworms or something, but I treat the ground occasionally with SlugGo Plus for pill bugs and sow bugs and that usually makes cutworms die too. I'm not going to sow any more seeds until this infernal rain finally stops falling. Normally I don't have any trouble with okra plants dying, but last year's excessive rainfall was hard on it, and now this month's excessive rainfall is the same. Sometimes I get okra volunteers from pods left on the plants or rototilled under the previous year, but (likely due to the excessive rain last year) there aren't any volunteers yet this year.

Basically, while I was busy harvesting and putting up the harvest from all the cool-season crops, and now the earliest of the warm-season ones, while I wasn't paying attention to it, my okra plants just melted away and one day I realize they were gone.

I have plenty of seed and will just sow more, but maybe in the back garden with its sandier soil (though it now is largely under water) instead of in the front garden with its amended clay in raised beds. I'll do it whenever the rainfall merry-go-round stops and the big gigantic puddles everywhere go away.

Some years you can get a lot of okra volunteers and others not so much. It just depends on the weather. I generally sow the seed where I want it, and then when volunteers come up someplace else, I leave them there if I want to or I transplant them while small or ruthlessly yank them out. Before we had a tall garden fence, the okra ate all my okra plants every chance they got, so I never had too much okra until we put up the 8' tall fence. Sometimes when I'm too busy to harvest in a timely manner, I put the big, woody pods on the compost pile for the deer. Sometimes they eat them and sometimes they don't.

The okra ate your okra? I've never seen you make a mistake like that in your comments, Dawn. You're working too hard.

I wish the mesonet had a station on our farm. Trying to guess where the rain otherwise hit in Lincoln County...

lol. It was too early in the morning. Tim's alarm woke me up about 3:45 a.m. and then it started raining and my body was awake even if my brain wasn't. How about the deer ate my okra? Now we've had our laugh for the day.