Borneo Okra – Seeds

Borneo okra is a very long fruited okra from the ultra tropical island of Borneo. The possession of the island is divided by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. When we read that this okra was introduced into the US by the fruit collector Crafton Clift, it was an easy decision to grow it out for our seed catalogue. Crafton, now in his 80’s, is a good friend and we have made it a personal mission to maintain and distribute crop varieties he collected on his many international trips. In his many late night plant collecting tales, Crafton somehow failed to ever mentioned this okra to us.

Borneo okra is special because it is a huge pod that stays tender at a much larger size than common okra varieties. There are other varieties like this in the seed trade but they aren’t especially common. It is a beautiful thing to be able to skip a couple days of okra picking and to find large pods still tender enough to eat.

This okra performed well in our raised production beds and yielded plenty of nice okra. The pods do not bear spines and the plant isn’t especially armed either. When the plants declined, the roots did show nematode damage as okras tend to do. Our first grow out was in the Spring of 2026 and the plants were done before the height of the rainy season had set in. We believe this variety will thrive through the Florida rainy season given it’s origins on an island dominated by tropical rainforests.

We have a lot more to learn about this variety, but our initial impressions are promising. We are excited to offer another gem collected by Crafton Clift, who should be considered one of the great tropical plant explorers of our era.

30 seeds