Still Harvesting Eggplant

Sometimes things work one year and absolutely flop the next.  No matter how you try to think about it, there are too many variables to isolate on what made it work or what made it fail.  This can apply to many things, but tonight I'm talking about eggplant.  Each year on January 1st I start all my tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds indoors in seed pots.  (Hard to believe I'll be doing this again in less than a month!)  Once germinated I move beneath grow lights until the last date of frost has passed and then I'll transplant into the garden.

Eggplant have a particularly long growing season.  You want to get them going early.  Last year, same as every other year I planted.  The eggplant germinated, languished, and gave up the ghost.  This year, using the same seed and doing everything else in similar fashion, they absolutely thrived.  Three eggplant plants have yielded more eggplant than I can count.  We've eaten caponata, oven fried eggplant, eggplant parmesan many times.  We've given some away.  They keep producing.  It is a good problem to have! 

Eggplant have an interesting history.  They are native to China and India.  It was brought by the Spanish into Europe.  Explorers brought the eggplant to the New World, but it did not catch on in American immediately.  As part of the nightshade family (along with potatoes and tomatoes), people thought they were poisonous.  One brave soul finally tried it and didn't die and, well, here we are today, cultivating them in our gardens and eating them in our kitchens.

It is December 1st and the eggplant are still blooming, still producing.  We'll undoubtedly harvest quite a few more before we have our first frost.  I think the flowers are very pretty on this plant.  It is a pinkish flower that the honeybees like to visit.

I took this last photo of another bloom on one of the eggplants and as I looked at it closer, I want to share something with you.  If you look directly beneath the center of the bloom, you can spot the silhouette of a dreaded garden pest I didn't see when taking the photo.  A Stink Bug!

Had I seen that booger, I would have squashed him on the spot.  He (or one of his offspring) will find a place to over-winter and will be attacking our tomato plants next spring.