Hello Hive.
Yesterday after our farm work of transplanting rice I decided to check on our Okro to see if we can find anything for soup. The Okro has should be ready for harvest by now since we have planted them much earlier. Even though I have not wished or prepared to grow okro in large scale my dad has often paired it with some other crops.
While planting corn or any other grain you will have Okro besides it.
We were often lucky in the past that whenever harvest comes we get to harvest corn for flour and then get Okro along side for soup.
Daddy did a mixed cropping for the Okro as usual. I was thinking that he would be planting it in our yam farms as well but he chose not to do that this year And also went ahead to plant the 3months cycle Okro as against the one of 40days life cycle I had desired that he plants.
With the way we are having very scanty rainfalls this year I would not advice anyone should plant crops that has longer life span. As they get affected by the weather conditions easier by the longer time they spend in farm. Planting crops with shorter life span gives us a little hope, as they grow and produce their fruits in the shortest time possible.
The one challenge here is that it is often difficult to convince my fathers to adopt new farming skills or tools, daddy is so used to his crude farming systems that encouraging him to plant our new varieties of seeds doesn't often work. Sometimes his reasons are genuine telling us that we should stop eating and growing more of those crops mixed with chemicals and how dangerous they are to our health.
Okro is one of the veggies we have planted this year and couldn't harvest anything from it. It all withered away. I am not bothered about this because we haven't planted them for commercial purpose and if we needed Okro for soup we can still get from the market. But I was worried for a farmer friend of mine who has grown Okro in a large scale and almost about two acre
Seeing that he wouldn't be harvesting anything from it was really disheartening after all the stress, finance and labour spent here. Probably if he had planted the 40days Okro it would have been better and the narrative different from now.
Alot of our local farmers here need orientation to avoid this kind of losses and I must confess that attending school and gaining knowledge there has help my farming journey even though I didn't study agriculture. Been educated is really important for whatever endeavor we want to pursue in life.