Beginner Gardening: What specifically is 'days to maturity?', 1 by Ozark

Ozark wrote:
"You grow all the okra you can and send me a crate. I'll grow all the cabbages and greens, and send YOU a crate!"
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I may take you up on that, Linda. I think I made a serious miscalculation when it came to planting okra this year.

I love okra so, for the past several years I've never raised QUITE enough in the garden. Last year I planted equal amounts of five okra varieties, and found that the enormous multi-branched Stewart's Zeebest plants produced as many pods as the four other varieties (Cowhorn, Perkins Long Pod, Hill Country Red, and Betty's White) combined. So this year I planted only Zeebest - 33 plants in rows 6' apart.

They're just a little above knee-high and unlike last year, they're producing their heads off early. I'm getting 2 or 3 pods off each plant, every day - they won't let me skip a day picking, and it's only the end of June. I can only imagine what they're gonna do later in the summer when they're shoulder-high multi-branched okra TREES, six feet across, like the ones I had to pull out of the ground with a tractor last fall. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a serious okra surplus. We're already freezing okra and I've been roasting some coated with olive oil on the BBQ with smashed new potatoes. GOOD.