Mrs. Spiller is wondering what she can cook with three or four pods of okra.

Pods and flowers; a double-duty vegetable.

One of her favorite summer recipes involves roasting sliced fresh okra with garlic, grape tomatoes, peas and mint. In fact, she was probably dreaming of that when she poked a few seeds of a dwarf heirloom okra into the soil along the back fence in July.

She thinned them to three plants that seem not to mind being squeezed into a  sliver of soil between a pot of Mr. Slicer’s grandmother’s ancient asparagus fern and an admittedly odd bed in which coleus and succulents coexist somewhat fitfully.

The okra is behaving itself rather nicely, growing vertically and causing no  trouble along the path. But it is making the gardener — who up until this point has been satisfied squeezing a tomato here and a little lettuce there among the perennials and bulbs — yearn for rows and more sun.

About these ads