Tuesday
was my first day volunteering at Umurima Garden in Decatur with Global Growers
Network. I worked alongside a Burundi
woman named Everdine. In mid-September,
gardens around Atlanta are in transition.
The summer crops are all but overgrown, eeking out the last produce from
almost-spent warm weather plants. The
fall seeds have recently been planted, but have not grown long enough to yield
much yet. Everdine and I spent our
morning harvesting tomatoes and okra. Or
rather, she harvested tomatoes – and I harvested okra.
I knew going into this that
gardening is hard work. It’s hot, it’s
dirty, and there are insects everywhere.
This is operation “Make Kate a Tough Cookie.” I refuse to be a baby about it. However.
I do want to document for those of you who have never had the privilege
of harvesting okra just exactly what you are missing out on – or maybe what you
have to look forward to!
So okra grows on big flowering stalks. These stalks have tiny little cacti-looking
prickles all over them. Late-summer okra
plants were looming over my head and some of the okra that had not been
harvested at the right size was large and dried, too big to pick. The ones I was taught to go for were small to
medium-sized, and they didn’t just snap off.
Many of them felt like a wrestling match, where I would pull and pull
until off it came. And the harder I
pulled, the more pricked I got by the sharp stalks. I rinsed my hands off four different times to
stop my hands from itching.
One other little joy about okra. Ants all over
the place. Apparently, ants like to
farm aphids. Aphids are slow-moving
insects that secrete a sweet sticky substance known as honeydew.[1] The ants “take care” of the aphids in return
for carting off this sweet food to eat.
It’s a nifty little process from which both bugs benefit. Full-grown okra plants are not endangered by
the aphids or the ants. But the
harvester gets clobbered by ants. They
were harmless ants, but they were teeming up and down my arms, my legs, my
chest, my neck.
Between the beating September sun, the prickles,
the itches, the ants, and the stinkbugs… I’ve decided that okra isn’t my
favorite thing to pick. I sure do love
the people who have plucked them from the stalks and bagged them all summer for
my produce boxes! Okra tastes that much
“sweeter” knowing about the itches and the insects. Never again will I take my gumbo for granted.
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