Okra is not very happy with transplanting. In my experience, you are better off to direct plant where you want it to grow though I would put in an exception that northern gardeners must start seed indoors. If you must start it indoors, try to use a container that is taller than 3 inches and put 5 seed in each cell. When it is about 2 inches tall, plant outdoors and thin to at most 2 plants per hill. Depending on variety, 12 inches apart in the row up to 3 feet apart in the row will work. I like my rows 42 inches apart. Burmese - very short okra, can be 12 inches apart in the row Clemson Spineless - medium size okra, can be 15 inches apart in the row Cowhorn - very tall okra, best 18 to 24 inches apart in the row. I like Cowhorn and Evertender for frying okra. Granny Franklin so far has not been beaten for a pickling and frying okra. If you direct seed, it is best to put 5 to 8 seed per hill and cover with about 1/2 inch of soil. I like to mix a bit of peat moss with some soil and cover the seed with the it. This tends to prevent soil crusting which can stop the seed from germinating. When the plants are 2 to 4 inches tall, thin to the best 1 or 2 plants per hill. DarJones

Larry, Congrats on the okra! I have found okra to be a pretty forgiving plant in terms of weather conditions. Unlike so many of our other veggies, it grows in clay and in drought, so you can't beat that! It never ceases to amaze me how quickly a mudhole turns into a desert. I think that people who are not gardeners don't really understand that. A lot of people here (those who don't garden, farm or ranch) think that just because we had heavy rain in April and May, that we've got it made for the whole year, and we gardeners know that's not true. I don't know how long it takes y'all to go from "flood" to "drought" there where you live, but here in southcentral OK, it only takes 3 weeks of low to no rainfall to put us back into a drought situation no matter how much rain has fallen previously. When it was raining so much that even the tomatoes in raised beds were drowing, I was desperate to finish planting, but you can't plant in raised beds with standing water in them and around them. So, we went to Lowe's and bought those round cardboard tubes you use as forms to pour concrete posts. Ours were 4' tall and 12" in diameter. Using a power saw, Tim cut them into 6" tall pieces. I set those 6" tall by 12" wide tubes on top of the soil in my raised beds, filled them with potting soil, and transplanted tomato, cucumber and cantaloupe seedings into them. Those plants took off great. Of course, the roots stayed "high and dry" those first couple of weeks and then grew on through the open bottom of the tube into the soil beneath. Once the regular soil in the raised beds had dried out and no longer smelled sour and mucky, I put 6" of mulch on that bed, so you cannot see those cardboard tubes. It was a great way to plant atop the wet beds without having to add another six inches of soil to the whole bed. In future rainy years, I intend to use the cardboard tube method again. I am a bit concerned your black plastic or landscape fabric will not be strong enough to hold the soil and keep it from sliding or washing out in a rainy year. Please keep us posted on how it works out for you. Mandy, I think you'd like okra. I like it best fried, which isn't the healthiest way of preparing it....but it is so very good! You can cook it in gumbo too, and I have a recipe for okra parmigiana that is a different way of preparing it. Okra is very versatile! Dawn

I CAN direct-seed okra if the soil is warm enough; but if we then get heavy rains (which often happens) germination can be slow and/or spotty. To get a decent yield, I use transplants: Jiffy 32's (with extra holes pinched into the bottoms), and 5-6 seeds per cell (more if older seed). The seeds germinate in 4-5 days, but may need to be misted several times a day to break out of their "helmets". After transplant & once the plants get established, I thin to the strongest 3-4 per cell. This enables me to get about 100 plants out of one tray... which I need, since we only have a few months of warm weather.

Dorothy, That's one reason I don't try really hard with off-season container tomatoes or with tomatoes grown indoors--the decline in the flavor is awful, and after October has ended, they grow and ripen at a snail's pace. Some years I've kept them alive by dragging them into the garage on cold nights, and leaving them in there on cold days. They do flower and set fruit, but the tomatoes that set in November-January took twice as long as usual to ripen and their flavor still was lacking and their size was as much as 1/4 the usual size. I think that if I used a heater to keep the greenhouse at daytime and nighttime temperatures like we typically have in May or early June, the winter tomatoes would taste better and maybe grow faster and size up better, but it isn't worth what it would cost to keep the greenhouse that warm. When I was removing row covers this morning, I noticed that some of the row covers a very thick and heavy layer of frost on them and others had a lighter patchier frost. Regardless, everything that was covered survived unscathed, except for three leaves on the Seminole squash. They were blackened and withered. They had been covered, but I suspect there was a rip in the row cover over them and the frost came in through that tear in the cover. As for the plants I left uncovered, most of them were fine overall but the upper foliage was damaged while the lower foliage and, in the case of the peppers, the fruit beneath the upper foliage, were not damaged. The plant that looks the worst? The big pecan tree. Its upper foliage is definitely frost-bitten or frozen. Everything underneath the upper foliage is fine. The four o'clocks were fine, but most of them get some protection from surrounding trees. All the container plants that we dragged into the garage on Friday are fine, and definitely were happy to be back outside in natural light this morning instead of indoors under fluorescent lighting. The last time I looked, they had raised our forecast low for tonight to 50 so I feel a little bit better about that than the 46 degrees forecast earlier. However, for those of you who are new to the forum and haven't heard me say this 500 times in the last 5 years, in one spring we had a forecast high of 50 and I didn't cover up my plants (it was early May) and the temperature dropped to 32 and almost everything froze back to the ground. So, even at 50 I feel a little nervous about the temperatures, and likely always will, but not nervous enough that I'll cover up everything again tonight. It is sunny, clear and perfectly gorgeous outside right now with a current temperature of 62 degrees. I hope the rest of this month is like today, but not like last night. Larry, I only found lady bugs and green lacewings on the plants underneath the floating row covers as I uncovered them this morning, but I had grasshoppers sitting on top of the row covers. I assume they were trying to find a way to get to the plants or they were just sunning themselves and waiting for me to uncover the plants. I went to the garden shed and got my spray bottle of Take-Down spray and hit each grasshopper with several squirts from that bottle. I doubt those hoppers are still alive or will give me any more trouble. Dawn