Okra Abuse

The okra is knee high and is beginning to grow pods. I guess it's about time to give it a whippin'.

Yes, that's right...a whippin'.

A couple of years ago, my mother said she wanted some okra when I had some to spare. When I told her that my okra hadn't even bloomed yet, she said, "Maybe you ought to whip it."

What?

"Evelyn whips hers," she added, as if that ought to settle it.

I had a sudden flashback.

Miss Evelyn and my mother are distant cousins and life-long friends. Our families spent a lot of time together when I was a child. I once saw Miss Evelyn yank her husband out of the passenger seat of a station wagon and whack him in the head with the heel of her size 5 penny loafer when he came home late, and blissfully inebriated, from a fishing trip. I did not doubt that she had it in her to light into a stalk of okra. But why? And with what?

Mother did not know precisely why Miss Evelyn whipped her okra, only that she did it with "a keen cane," and that it helped.

A keen cane.

I pictured Miss Evelyn in the garden, wielding a cane fishing pole, its tip whistling through the air like helicopter blades, okra tops whirlwinding around her....

I could not picture myself performing such a maneuver in a fashion that might benefit the plants and boost production, so I dropped the subject.

Later that evening, I went back to Mother's house to visit with my sister and her husband. As we were sitting around the kitchen table, Daddy (who had been napping during my earlier visit) asked how my garden was doing. "I sure could go for some good fried okra," he said. I told him my okra wasn't making yet. He said, "They tell me you can whip it with a keen cane, and it'll really help it."

"I told you so," Mother said, all smug-like.

I looked across the table at my sister. "They want me to whip my okra. With a keen cane."

She looked astonished. "Why?"

I shrugged. "Ask 'em."

She couldn't make any more sense out of it than I could.

Fast forward a week. My husband and I walked down to check on the garden. As we passed the back porch, Pop-Pop called from the shadows, "I b'lieve y'orter take that keen cane leaning there against the porch and whip your okra with it."

I whirled around. "Have you been talking to Miss Evelyn?"

"Who?"

"Why would I want to whip my okra?"

"Make it b'ar," Pop-Pop said.

"How does whipping it make it bear?"

"Don't know. Just does."

"Couldn't I just cut it?"

"Reckon y'could," he said.

I got some clippers from the shed and, thinking that the objective was to make the plants bushier, I snipped the top out of one of the plants.

"Not like that," Pop-Pop hollered. "Take off the bottom leaves."

I was glad my back was to him, so he couldn't see the face I made, but I went ahead and cut the bottom two leaves off of each plant, still baffled as to how this might help. (Didn't they need those leaves for photosynthesis?) When I finished, I went to the back porch. "There. Satisfied?" I asked him.

"Didn't cut off enough," he said.

The next day, after Sunday dinner at Mama Jewell's, Uncle Jack explained the whole business to me: taking the lower leaves off of the plants stresses them, and makes them eager to hurry up and reproduce. He said I ought to take off every leaf where a bloom wasn't forming at the junction of the leaf stem and the main stalk. He said every time I cut a pod of okra, I should take off the leaf adjoining it. Thrashing the leaves off with a cane allowed one to stand back from the plants, away from the invisible nettles that would be raining off the leaves. It should be a vertical strike, not a horizontal one, as I had been imagining. And one doesn't use a whole fishing pole - just a short piece, "the keen end," he said.

Even though I didn't quite buy the okra's reproductive logic, the idea of removing the leaves was beginning to make a little sense. That evening, I went to the garden. The cane was still leaning against the back porch. It was only about 3 feet long. Still, I'd planted my rows close together. I imagined that swinging that cane among the plants would tear them all to pieces. I took out my clippers and snipped a few leaves off of each plant. The next day, feeling braver, I cut off even more leaves. Within two days, the okra was blooming, and a couple of days after that, I was cutting okra for supper.

As the summer passed, I learned that I didn't actually have to cut the leaves off the plants; I could just knock them off with the closed clippers if I gave them a swift whack where they connected to the central stalk. I learned that fewer leaves on the plants made the picking job less itchy. I learned that dropping the big leaves, stems and all, between the rows eventually creates a carpet that weeds won't penetrate. And I learned that cutting off the lower leaves turns dwarf okra plants into giant, redwood forest okra trees. By the end of the summer, I needed a step-ladder to reach the pods.

In any case, I'm sold on okra whippin', though I'm still not brave enough to have at it with the cane.

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