Eggplant

Thanks to the Landreth Seed Co. for the following info:

This is a ‘heads-up’. It is not meant to alarm or frighten. The intent is to educate and inform.

During the 2012 gardening season, blight is going to be a problem. Early season, mid season and late season blight are going to be a problem for tomatoes and potatoes and possibly eggplants. The moisture that inundated the United States east coast with Hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee and the extraordinarily mild winter have combined to create an unusually comfortable environment for the proliferation of blight spores.

Blight is a fungus transmitted by spores which can lay dormant in soil and be carried by the wind as much as 50 miles in a day. Under ideal conditions spores can germinate in ½ hour. The last great outbreak was in 2009, but 2012 may also be a record year.

For those of you who intend to grow tomato, potato or eggplant plants, you MUST take precautions early even if you are organic gardeners. Landreth suggests that you use copper fungicide, a fungicide approved for organic farming. Use the powder form of copper fungicide. Copper fungicide is sold at most garden centers. Dust the soil where you are going to plant your tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants and till the dust into the soil. On the day you plant your seedlings, dust the seedlings, and repeat this dusting every two weeks, for two more dustings.

The peak of the harvest is past, and yet we tried second plantings of some crops because we had the space, to see what would happen.  With about a month to go, here's their progress.

Cabbage & Cauliflower:  large leaves, producing well, but no sign of heads yet.

Carrots:  leafy fronds are doing well; no sign of poking out of the ground.

Beets:  alive but struggling.

Spinach:  mostly eaten by Something.

Peas:  half-height, base leaves yellowing, no sign of peas.

Lettuce:  looking good!  Might harvest some next week.

Also, here's an update on some first plantings:

Eggplant:  *continues* to produce, though more slowly.

Beans:  the bush beans produced another handful; the pole beans have disappointed.

Potatoes:  we pulled a single plant to obtain some potatoes for display at Town Day.  The number amidst the roots was extensive, and while mostly small-to-tiny, there was at least one big red one.  From just one plant!

Squash:  the tiny zucchini was accidently harvested; there's still a medium yellow squash; and the pattipan has several small fruits (not to mention flowers) which it thinks it has time to make bigger -- we'll see.

The mildew is back to some extent on the squash, and worse, has jumped to the other side of the garden and covered the collard leaves.

The rest of the greens (kale, chard, arugula and other herbs) still doing well.

Growth has exploded in some parts of the garden. Some veggies, including the eggplants and the cucumbers, have spilled over into adjacent paths and are now breaking out through open slots in the garden's fence.

I opened the garden for an hour and a half yesterday afternoon. Though there were dramatic rains in both Lexington and Boston, none here! Even so, the garden looked well watered.

A nice group of Asian-American mothers and children came to visit. They remarked on the eggplants (great purple blossoms), the amaranth, and the tomatoes. Earlier a mother with two daughters enjoyed finding the hidden zucchini. Several people took the cards.

I tried to draw the amaranth and the basil, impossible as usual.

 
Just a week ago, the garden's Nadia eggplants were beginning to look like a lost cause. They were flat to the ground, at best just 1/3 the height of the Mangans. Plus they had no blooms, where the Mangans had bloomed early.

Happily, however, the Nadias are now catching up. Several display gorgeous blooms of their own. And they've shot up, doubling their height. They're not the height of the Mangans, to be sure, but they are now at least half way.

Let's not count the Nadias out yet.

I've heard the words of my headline tossed around the garden this spring, figuring they meant something but not getting the concepts entirely. But I think I have it now, and it's worth sharing. (Or so I think; you decide.)

The times I've heard the terms tossed, the subject was tomatoes. According to this tomato-growing site, determinant varieties, including the well-known Roma variety, grow to a roughly defined height, stop growing when the fruit sets at the end of each branch, ripen about the same time, and then die.

Indeterminants keep growing until frost — flowering, setting fruit, and ripening all at the same time, on different stalks.

Recently, my gardening mate Michael Smith, who horticultures for a living, shared a brief film on pinching out young tomato-plant branches that I later realized are what others call "suckers," another term I'd heard but didn't quite grasp. (There's a lot of that for me in the presence of actual gardeners.)

After watching, I went out into my own garden and pinched — or clipped — all the suckers, which are identified as growths emanating from the juncture of the main stem and a side shoot. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that these suckers will make the plants bushier, bringing no advantage, at the expense of energy that would better be applied to the fruit. 

Then I noticed that my eggplant plants also have suckers, and wondered if I should cut them out, too. Luckily, I didn't. I asked around among the gardeners and got no definitive answer, though one guy said he thought it made sense, and another observed that both tomatoes and eggplants are from the nightshade family.

 
Mangan got her first flowers this weekend, a full week earlier than expected.

She's also now a stately 3 times taller than the very squat Nadia.

Plus her stems and veins are a beautiful deep purple, where Nadia looks quite plain.

At this point, Mangan is leaving Nadia in the dust.

We planted two varieties of eggplant this Saturday. One is Nadia, a zaftig, Rubenesque traditionalist from southern Europe. The other: Mangan, a darker, more svelte and modern variety from eastern Asia.

Both are beauties; and each has her fans. Both are also prima donnas. They abhor cold soil. So Nadia grew to seedling state in a greenhouse over at Waltham Fields, a few miles southwest of us, while Mangan got her start at Busa Farm, just over the town line in Lexington.

According to studies we found on the net, these two varieties should enjoy an interesting competition this growing season. Mangan is the speedy one. She should flower in as little as 4 weeks, then produce her first fruit 2 weeks after that. Nadia unfolds at a slower pace. She should lag Mangan by a couple of weeks in coming to full flower and another 3 weeks in bearing fruit.

But her fruit will be bigger, their shape more fetching to the eye. Pound for pound, Nadia should also end up producing more edible flesh per plant, though Mangan should best her in the number of individual fruits produced.

All in all, for those of us attending these two, this should be a lively competition to watch.