Jason Roland is a rock star of a young organic farmer here in SC If you’re reading this and you know Jason, please don’t tell him about it. I don’t have a good answer to this question.
Jason’s words of wisdom regarding okra planting are: freeze the seeds for 24 hours dry in a ziplock bag then take them out of the freezer and soak them in hot tap water for 2-3 hours before planting them in a warm, sunny place (like a greenhouse).
I have done this before and it seemed to work pretty well, but some of my seeds did not come up. I wasn’t sure if it was because the seeds were old or if the freezing killed them.
So this year I decided to do a little experiment…
On Wednesday, April 25, I planted four of each variety of okra we are growing this year in four grow bags after giving them the freeze and hot water soak treatment. Then on Thursday, April 26 I planted two of each variety and two bags after just soaking them in warm water overnight.
Then on Saturday, April 27 I noticed these…
The sprout in the lower left side of this tray was the first one I noticed growing. It is in the tray planted with seeds that got the Jason Roland freeze treatment.
But if you look carefully in the top of the sleeve marked B on the left in the picture above, you’ll notice a Burgundy okra seedling that has just popped up. This is in the tray with seeds that were only soaked in warm water…
Then, on Sunday…
Jason’s Freeze Treated seeds…. vs.
My overnight soaked seeds!
Suddenly it’s becoming clear that freezing has jump-started the germination process in the okra seeds! My tray still only has the one Burgundy seedling up while the one treated with Jason’s freezing and hot water soaking method has at least 10 seeds that are up and have their seed leaves unfurled in a lot of cases!
Then one day later on Monday…
Jason’s…
Mine. (Ignore the four extra plants with the pointy leaves on the left side of the tray. They’re Thai Basil plants I took from a flowerpot at school so I could grow them out and plant them at home.)
13 out of 40 of the seeds I planted after just soaking them are up at this point. That’s a 32.5% germination rate.
38 out of 128 seeds treated with the freeze and hot water technique are up. That’s a 29% germination rate.
On Tuesday the soaked seeds were up to 20 out of 40 making it a 50% germination rate.
61 of the 128 freeze treated seedlings were up or about a 48% germination rate. **
Tuesday.
So my results show that soaking okra seeds overnight leads to about the same results as freezing them overnight and then soaking them in hot water for 2-3 hours…
But what about the size of the seedlings? It really seems like if you compare the okra seedlings grown from seeds that were frozen to the ones that were grown from seeds that were just soaked, the ones that were frozen have grown faster once they sprouted.
Now I know that this isn’t a perfectly controlled and conducted experiment. It did show me that some of my seeds were not fresh enough to sprout any more. Our Texas Hill Country seeds and Beck’s Big Buck seeds might not be viable anymore. This might have affected the results of the experiment. (This result actually surprised me since the Texas Hill Country seeds are only a couple of years old, but almost all the Burgundy okra seeds sprouted and they’re around 3-4 years old.)
So back to the original question…. Why do I question the wisdom of Jason Roland?
I think in part it’s just a natural curiosity and wanting to figure out things for myself. It might be a trait I inherited from my family. My grandfather was a tinkerer. He loved working on cars and couod take apart and fix just about anything. He taught himself to play the piano and the organ by ear and could play any tune he could heard.
Im a lot like that in a lot of ways. I love to tie flies for fishing and I’m constany experimenting with different color combinations and types of fur, feather, and tinsel tied to those hooks trying to make a fly that catches more fish. I love to learn about new ways to grow vegetables in the garden and to adapt old ways to grow things to new plants. (For example, I plan on adapting the 3 sisters technique of growing beans up corn stalks this summer by substituting tropical blue butterfly pea vines for the beans and growing them up sugar cane!)
Experimenting and being curious about trying new ways to do things is all part of the fun of gardening. We set up natural experiments and learn by trial and error, trying to improve our results with each new attempt to grow something. If a plant dies or doesn’t grow the way we want it to, there’s always next season. The important part is that we don’t give up. We persevere and learn from our mistakes.
And if you have read this far in this post and you do happen to know Jason Roland, you can go ahead and let him know I sometimes question what he teaches me. I actually already told him I was going to write this blog post. He already knows how I can be. Stubborn and wanting to learn from my own mistakes. And he’s OK with that. He doesn’t take it personally. He’s a good friend.
But he did tell me when I told him about this post I was writing one piece of advice I should always keep in mind… He said that whenever I was trying to figure out a new garden problem all I needed to do was remember to ask WWJD… “What would Jason do?”
I think I might just take that advice!
** Footnote: The picture above shows the ONLY Beck’s Big Buck okra seedlings we managed to grow this year. Of the 4 seeds planted after only soaking them, 0 sprouted. Of the 16 planted in the sleeves above, 12 sprouted! That’s a 75% germination rate versus a 0% germination rate!
So Jason’s freezing and soaking in hot water technique definitely DOES work better than soaking alone!
The seeds we used to grow our Beck’s Big Buck okra came from a gentleman in Texas. He sent them to me back in 2019, so they’re 5 years old. They might not have grown at all without the freeze and hot water soaking treatment!
I’m so glad I did do the freeze and soak method because Beck’s Big Buck is a really tasty, tender okra with large pods that can be snapped off the plant when they’re ready to eat. The stems don’t get so tough that you have to cut the pods off with clippers.
Hopefully we can collect some of these pods and dry them this year so we have a supply of fresh seeds for future summer gardens.