Cmagnus's eggplant
Solanum melongena

This eggplant is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! This is an ex-eggplant!!

We’re looking at lows approaching freezing and highs approaching… not anywhere near high enough to help with fruiting. So my partner and I pulled up the eggplant and harvested all the little baby eggplants, and the not so little eggplants, that were still hanging around. The garden looks empty now. This whole cold thing takes some getting used to. There were loads of obviously fertilized flowers that we just had to say goodbye to. But, now I have space to put in my other batch of garlic.

I guestimate I’ve 10-15 2-4inch fruit on the vine. I’m hoping they’ll get bigger.

The eggplant is finally slowing down. I’ve gotten no big eggplants from it for a while. There are still quite a lot of fruit on it, but most are 2-3 inches long and have been that way for a few days. Bees are still visiting it, so I imagine it’s getting fertilized. The weather is looking to warm up for a while. I’m not giving up on the possibility of a eggplanty rebound, but I’ll be lucky if it does much more this year.

We had wind last night. The sort of heavy wind that makes you wake up in the middle of the night and, without opening your eyes, move your aloe veras into the other room because the wind was blowing the curtains into them so turbulently that they made a really loud noise.

Nothing was really affected except for the eggplant, with it’s big, sail-like leaves. I woke up this morning to find that my eggplant was a good foot shorter than it used to be, and that the path along the side of the bed was a good deal less existant than it used to be. I took the opportunity to harvest some eggplants I hadn’t actually been able to reach when the plants were upright. Other than that, they don’t seem to be seriously harmed, so I will leave them. It’s not worth trying to stake them back up when the season is almost over. I feel very odd, though, when looking at the garden. I can now see all my peppers that were overgrown by them. The bed itself looks oddly empty. But I think the peppers will enjoy their two weeks of sun.

The eggplant has gotten to the point where I can’t keep up with it. I didn’t find any harvestable eggplants when I went out this morning. I found 3 when I went out this afternoon. The plants have just gotten so big and full of nooks and crannies where fruit can hide behind leaves. I’ll be on the other side of the garden doing something else, and look up and see a huge eggplant. Then when I get to the plant I can’t find it to harvest it because it can only be seen if, for instance, I’m standing ten feet away next to a particular beet. I need inspector gadget arms.

Since we staked the eggplant in the middle of the night a couple of days ago, we didn’t do the worlds greatest job. It was finally clear today so I could go out and check on it. I untangled a bunch of its leaves, that had gotten bunched around the middle. It looks much more like it did before the storm now.

I thought I only had one little eggplant, which I’d planned on taking a picture of. Eggplants are like big stacks of umbrellas; it’s really hard to see what’s going on under those leaves. So imagine my surprise when I blindly stuck my camera in there and took a picture of my single eggplant, only to find that a) the picture looked good and b) at least 6 little eggplants in varying stages of growth.