Veggie Garden Info

Eggplant, One of My Favorite Vegetables

Original post from May Dreams Gardens, February 17, 2008                 

                                                                                 

Other than tomatoes, one of my favorite vegetables is eggplant. That’s right, eggplant. Solanum melongena. Aubergine. I usually grow three or four plants of eggplant in my vegetable garden and enjoy one or two summer meals with fried eggplant, tomato slices, fresh green beans, and my own homegrown sweet corn.

It’s a happy day here at May Dreams Gardens when I can harvest all four of these vegetables on the same day and eat them together for one meal.

Read the rest of this post HERE.

Building up your soil and making compost

Original post from Down To Earth, October 06, 2007

These are the heirloom purple eggplants we grew earlier this year.

One of the main principles of organic gardening is to build healthy soil that enable plants to grow and bear fruit. If you build up your soil and keep increasing the amount of organic matter you add to it each year, it will reward you with a bountiful harvest year after year.

You don’t really need to know what type of soil you have because it will all benefit from having compost added to it. If you have sandy soil, the solution is to add compost and as much organic matter to increase the water holding capabilities and structure of the soil. If your soil is clay, the solution is to add compost to help break up the thick glug that doesn’t allow adequate aeration of plant roots. Actually, clay soil is full of nutrients, it’s just that it’s trapped in a structure that is so sticky that it can’t be accessed by plants. If you’re blessed with good loamy soil, you guessed it, it will be greatly improved by adding organic matter.

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How The Garden Is Growing.

Original post from Lucky's Duck Farm, August 11, 2007

 thought today's post could be about some individual photos of some of the plants in the vegie patch.

This purple/white eggplant was sown from a seed last year and has been left to the winter elements and has survived. Looks pretty sad and sorry but there is good news......

New leaves are forming and so I am hoping this means the plant won't drop dead as winter comes to an end. If all goes well, I'll give it a light pruning in early September. 
 

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Recipe: Eggplant Roulades

Original post from Life In Sugar Hollow, August 9, 2007

Leora has been taking good care of me this summer, bringing surplus veggies from her CSA. This past weekend's bounty included eggplants and garlic. So eggplant roulades were in order.
 

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First, let me start out by saying that I rarely make it to the marinate-and-wrap-around cheese step of this recipe. The eggplant is crazily yummy after just broiling it in the garlic oil.
 

But, this time around I also tried out a quick approach to a fry-less Eggplant Parmesan. 

Read the rest of this post HERE.

Eggplant Harvest

Original post from Veggie Gardening Tips, July 23, 2007

just wanted to share some of the organic heirloom eggplants that I’m growing and harvesting from the vegetable garden this summer. Previous articles on this veggie gardening site covered tips for growing eggplants and discussed the exotic international roots of heirloom eggplant varieties.

Now there’s a new harvest maturing to provide additional images and examples of how colorful and interesting heirloom eggplants can be in the garden or the kitchen.

Tired and bored of the same old, dark purple eggplants that you’ve been purchasing from the local grocer? There are more choices and variety than you may have imagined, but the catch is that you’ll have to grow these babies yourself. 

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Eggplant with Nose

Original post from Ottawa Hortiphilia, July 17, 2007

Okay, those hybridizers have just gone too far!

This is today's harvest of an asian type long eggplant (can't find the seed packet... grr). Anyhow, its a prolific thing. This was going to be the last year I grew eggplants but now I consider it the first successful of many, or so I hope.

I thank clear plastic mulch to warm the beds along with the variety that I picked because from my reseach it seems that long and smaller fruited eggplants are more adapted to cooler, shorter seasons than the bigger italian ones. 

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Reheading cabbage and short season sweet potato update

Original post from Ottawa Hortiphilia, July 11, 2007

It's that time of year where I spend all my time gardening, and less time looking up gardening questions unless, of course, there is some problem...

So far, so good.

We have pests: cabbage moth, cucumber beetle, colarado potato beeltle (which only seems to be interested in my physalias - the primary reason I grow the invasive darlings). We have see-saw weather, but so far my veggie crises are minimal.

Re-heading cabbage

Same savoy as in the above link.

Can you see them? Darling little heads growing at the leaf axils as promised! They should make nice tender additions to a soup, a stirfry, my sandwich...
 

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Great Eggplant Varieties

Original post from Veggie Gardening Tips, June 26, 2007

As a follow up to the recent posts on Growing Eggplants and Controlling Flea Beetles on Eggplants, I wanted to share a few rare and unusual varieties of heirloom eggplants that are available to the home gardener.

A Foreign Affair with Eggplants

Do a little research and you’ll quickly discover that eggplants are well traveled and a very international vegetable. There are many exotic varieties hailing from remote regions of Turkey, Africa, Italy, Thailand, India, China, the Ukraine, and Louisiana.

Okay, maybe Louisiana doesn’t qualify as foreign or remote but there is an heirloom eggplant called Louisiana Long Green, and a few other obviously domestic heirlooms such as the Florida High Bush and Florida Market varieties. 

Read the rest of this post HERE.