In praise of okra
It’s humble, it thrives and it tastes like summer
This summer’s garden has been a disappointment. The cucumber plants showed early promise, long green tendrils snaking up carefully set stakes, pushing out all sorts of blossoms, but produced very little fruit. The melons were a tease: mismarked seed envelopes yielded not the promised “cantaloupes” and “honeydews,” but hard, bitter gourds. The Better Boys, Celebrities and Arkansas Travellers are best not discussed, a mess of leafless, spindly stalks, dotted with wrinkly, flavorless produce. Had Guy Clark encountered these homegrown tomatoes, the song would have taken a much darker tone.
The herb garden never materialized. The mound where we planted seven varieties of lettuce, anticipating weeks of fresh salads, stayed bare, save for a sad tuft of arugula at the very top, perched on the dirt like a green, ill-fitting toupee. Nothing lived up to expectations. Nothing did what it was supposed to do.
Except the okra. We threw some okra seeds into the ground in May, mainly because we’d pulled up all the ersatz melon plants, and that left a huge bare spot in the backyard. I wasn’t worried about it growing. I didn’t care if it grew. I don’t much care for okra.
It grew. Okra, it turns out, is the Timex of the plant world: It takes a lickin’ and keeps on producing okra. The plants withstood torrential rains and baking heat. They
Okra doesn’t care if you ignore it. Okra doesn’t need your love. Okra just grows.
resisted insect encroachment that devastated other, less hardy plants. At full development, most of the plants were easily over 4 feet tall, each with a stalk as thick as a sturdy child’s forearm, all of this with no fertilizing, no weeding, no attention at all from the gardener. Okra doesn’t care if you ignore it. Okra doesn’t need your love. Okra just grows.
And okra is beautiful. Those tall, strong stalks produce huge leaves, a canopy the dark green of a classic Jaguar racer, shading the garden soil. Okra blossoms are a rare work of art, tight buds slowly unfolding gossamer petals tinted the most delicate yellow, a rich burgundy daub at their center. Okra pods grow long and straight, weird, oversize Crayolas colored the green side of chartreuse, pleasing, pleasant, unusual, a shade found only in the 120-count box.
We harvested pods for weeks. If there is one trick to growing okra, it’s harvesting. Okra is like Jack’s beanstalk, or a teenaged boy’s feet: growth is unrelenting, almost instantaneous. Pods that were the size of my pinky finger one day, were gargantuan the next. The bigger the pod gets, the less usable it is. Leave a pod even a day too long, and it’s wasted, woody and flavorless. Pick them when they’re ready, and you will be amazed at okra’s versatility. I’ve pickled quarts and quarts of the stuff, old-timey green and blue Mason jars filled with pods and garlic cloves and the occasional hot pepper lined up in our pantry. I’ve fried them, too, and roasted them, unadorned save for some sea salt, some pepper and a spritz of olive oil. I’ve even eaten them raw, fresh off the stalk, moist and fresh and not even a little slimy. They tasted like summertime.
It had been a long time since I’d felt really at peace. The presidential election slogs on, an exercise in communal discomfort, like watching your nonagenarian grandparents squabbling in their adjoining beds at the assisted living facility, insults and incoherence and weakly tossed slippers, a dispiriting scene, a grim reminder that most things, even the concept of representative democracy, end badly. Our days are numbed by endless accounts of cruelty and injustice: the solemn, stoic faces of children who have seen humanity’s worst stare at us from refugee camps, from bombed cities, from the front lines of the oxycontin epidemic. We watch, glazed, outraged and paralyzed, all broken hearts and over-informed impotence. It is hard to keep going. It is hard to know how to help, how to hope.
I stare out the window and watch the okra grow, those bottle green leaves swaying gently in the breeze, creamy blossoms and Crayola pods providing light-catching contrast, doing what okra does, not caring that no one ever writes a song about it, not particularly worried that it was what we got, not what we wanted.
I watch the okra, and my mind is filled with the faces of people I know, and I think, “You need to call him. He needs to talk,” and “You have not been kind to her. Do better,” and “It wouldn’t kill you to be a little more patient” and “Go over and visit them. They’re struggling, and you can bring some peace.” The messages carry a gentle insistence: “Don’t tarry. Make that call, make that visit, make that change today. By tomorrow, the opportunity will be gone.” Maybe it is a silly thing, but in this most miserable of seasons, with the heat and the disappointments and the riptide pull of melancholy, a clump of okra plants taught me to be a better man, a hopeful man, a humble man.
Let the tomatoes get the attention. Let the tomatoes get the folk songs and the photo spreads in the fancy cooking magazines. Tomatoes are great. It’s always nice to have a little flashiness in the garden. Just save some space for the humble okra.
Soon, those sturdy stalks will all be uprooted. The raised beds will be turned and prepped, and the fall garden will be planted. The okra will be fine with that, too. They’ve given fruit and given comfort; giving way is not a big deal. There’s a message in that, too, one I’m not quite ready to contemplate.
For now, I’m just happy it’s here.