Okra Timing
If Okra was a person I would say one thing about it. It doesn't care about what you think ready is. 50 to 60 days is the maximum. After that, the pods get woody and tough and have no value and the plant keeps growing like nothing happened.
My neighbour's got more than 30 plants and has been producing okra since March last year, and she never misses a window. But my story is a bit different, I planted mine late, because I had a goat bust through my fence. I would rant about it but this is not the place for that. Anyway, by the time I got serious, I lost over half of my harvest to some unforgiveness on the part of the okra.
What people don't understand about okra is that it is a very unforgiving plant in this manner. Harvesting must be done in a very typical timeframe, every 2 to 3 days, or the okra will simply serve as a large piece of decorative green finger for your garden that no one will eat.
There is a very disciplined aspect to growing okra. It will just quietly produce and if you are negligent, you will have suffered the consequences, although they are low stakes but still very real. From seed to first cut, approximately 50 to 65 days, after that it's time for harvesting or nurture on a continual basis.
In just 48 hours of inattention, you could possibly lose the opportunity to harvest.
I ate some of the old, tough okra. They were very slow cooked for nearly an hour to make them soft enough for eating. They were actually good, but that isn't the point. Because it's technically still a failed mission that I managed to even make it edible enough. That's what you'll go through if you don't use timing for such a crop.