Eggplant is one of my most favourite vegetables. I was encouraged to eat them since I was in the grade school when my home economics teacher said it is roughage, and as such assists in the digestion. So I have loved eating them---- as
relleno, pan fried, grilled and also as
ensalada, where my mother just boiled and peeled them and mixed it with garlic, vinegar, salt and sugar. This is one vegetable I would most love to have in my garden. Unfortunately, however, I was never successful then for the last three years.
Without giving up, I brought early this summer a punnet of seedlings from Bunnings. From over eight seedlings, six grew a little bigger, three of which just wilted because of this summer's extreme heat in Sydney. Funny as it might be, I put umbrella on the three eggplants and watered them in three regimes: early morning, mid afternoon and at night.
I anticipated them growing and growing as day passed by. Below is a picture of one of the seedlings that had grown bigger from the original seedlings---the leaves of which were pecked by a bird or probably chewed by the snails. I don't know exactly the life stage of egg plant, but I will refer them accordingly to my basic knowledge of botany.
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| several leaf -stage seedling |
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| flowering stage |
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| early fruit formation |
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| mid fruit formation |
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| my first eggplant harvest. Yay!!! I could not take a picture of it while it is the plant because the plant bent so low that this fruit touched the soil so I picked it straightaway as snails might chew on it. |
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| Egg plant around wild Amaranth spinosus . I allowed this spinach to grow wildly around the eggplants serving as canopy to protect them from the heat, ie. as I observed that eggplant flowers wilting because of extreme hot temperatures. |
