This week in the garden we have started harvesting some new, warm weather crops. Our okra is producing a few pods each day, even though the plants are still quite short. We like Cow Horn okra, which can get relatively large without getting fibrous. We cut at 5″, using pruners. Some years we have attached a card to the handles of the pruners we use for this job, with a life-size drawing of a 5″ pod. This helps new crew get it right. We have a 90′ row, with plants about 18″ apart in the row. This will be enough for the hundred of us (some people never eat okra despite the cooks’ best efforts!)
We grow asparagus beans (yard-long beans) to add variety to stir-fries, not as a major crop. To me, the flavor is not as good as bush green beans, but the shape and color, and the easy-care nature of this crop make them worthwhile. We grow Chinese Red Noodle or Purple Podded, which both keep their color when cooked. We harvest them at pencil-thickness, not at the yard-long puffy and stringy stage. Cut into one inch lengths, they brighten up any dish of mixed vegetables. Once the tall trellis is in place, this crop needs little work. They like the heat and are fairly drought-tolerant – they are more closely related to southern peas (cowpeas) than to green beans. They are not much troubled by Mexican bean beetles, and they’ll go on producing beans until the frost.
Normally we’d start picking sweet corn about now, but this year our first sowing suffered in the unusual early hot dry weather of our spring. We even plan for some degree of failure with our first sowing, because we do sow it early, which is always risky. We sow some seeds in Styrofoam Speedling flats on the same day we make our first outdoor sowing. The Styrofoam flats float in a water tank, needling little attention from us. Our plan is to use the seedlings at 2-3″ tall, to fill gaps in the rows. This year even this plan B didn’t work out. We were very busy and the seedlings got too big for successful transplanting. So we have very little early corn this year, sigh.
Next up, any day now, will be our first harvest of edamame. This is a kind of soy, which can be eaten fresh. We like Envy, a fast-maturing kind on short plants. We pull them up and strip the pods as soon as they are a bright green, moving towards gold, and the beans are a good size inside the pods. Some gardeners prefer a taller variety, and harvest several times from the same plants. We tried this, but found we prefer the once-over harvest. We make a succession of five or six sowings, to provide a new harvest every few weeks until frost.
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