Gardening

Eggplant

WORDS LYNDA HALLINAN

IMAGES ASHLEE DECAIRES

Summer is the only gardening season that catches me unaware ... every year. How can it be time to dust off the beach bags and stock up on sunscreen when I haven't even sown my eggplant seeds yet?

Summer gears up as the rest of the year winds down, but now is not the time to take your foot off the pedal. Now is the time to sow, plant, water, feed and repeat, then you can get on with cleaning the barbecue, stocking the beer fridge and relocating the stash of garden hose fittings you tidied away – somewhere – at the end of last summer.

It's funny how our taste buds seek out summer's succulence long before our gardens are ready to supply its most famous flavours: tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, peppers, basil and sweetcorn. I find it impossible to resist the first small bags of green beans that appear in supermarkets just as my homegrown seedlings are barely breaching the soil. Ditto cherry tomatoes; boutique hothouse varieties are available at my local farmers' market before I've even dared introduce my baby seedlings to the great outdoors. But better late than never, right? If, like me, life got in the way of your seed sowing plans (fantasies?) this year and you missed the boat to sow eggplants, tomatoes, capsicums and chillies, garden centres are well-stocked with an increasingly diverse range of gourmet varieties. I've raised eggplants from seed before, but I don't think I'd bother again. For starters, there's nothing to gain by getting a jump start on summer, as eggplants sulk in cold soil and won't set fruit until it warms up. Unless you have a heated glasshouse to cosset them along indoors until November, when the weather gods are less tetchy, it's far easier to buy large sturdy seedlings from garden centres now – even better if they're grafted for extra vigour and faster fruiting. Prepare a sunny spot for planting, enriching the soil with compost and general garden fertiliser. (If you have a keen fisher in the family, the finest eggplants I've ever seen in a friend's garden were grown on top of a trench of fish frames buried a foot deep so the family dog didn't dig them up!) Protect seedlings with slug bait, and water deeply throughout summer, soaking the soil around the plants rather than spraying the foliage. Mulch to conserve soil moisture and, once the plants start flowering, feed regularly with liquid tomato fertiliser. Then it's just a waiting game until it's baba ganoush season again.

VARIETY GUIDE

• Eggplants have a reputation for being pernickety prima donnas but that's largely due to our climate, rather than their constitution. They need shelter and heat (especially warm nights) to flourish.

• The easiest eggplants to grow outdoors are the small-fruited aubergines, such as the purple chipolata-shaped Ping Tung Long, which crops all summer long, and the green speckled Thai types (sold as Kermit or Green Egg). As a general rule, the smaller the fruit, the more you'll get off each plant. • In pots, plant compact hybrid varieties such as Patio Baby or

Ophelia (these may simply be labelled as “dwarf eggplants” in the shops). • Large, plump, pear-shaped purple eggplants are skite-worthy but also, in my experience, a little sulky. Black Beauty, Black King and Florence Round Purple all need staking, otherwise these buxom beauties are liable to split their stalks under the weight of the fruit. It's also a good idea, after each large fruit has set, to carefully pick off the old flower petals so they don’t rot onto the fruit, causing botrytis fungus to set in.

Lynda Hallinan

Waikato born-and-raised gardening journalist Lynda Hallinan lives a mostly self-sufficient life at Foggydale Farm in the Hunua Ranges, where she grows enough food to satisfy her family, free-range chooks, kunekune pig and thieving pukekos. She has an expansive organic vegetable garden and orchards and is a madkeen pickler and preserver.