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| I don't have any pictures of eggplant, so I'm showing the pictures of what's blooming in yard right now starting with this lone crocus. It has colors of purple and white the colors of eggplants. How's that for a stretch? |
The first thing that popped into my head for E was eggplant. Eggplant is not something I regularly cook or eat so I don't know much about it. I do know that it's a member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) and I like the purple color of the fruit. It wasn't until recently that I knew that one of the varieties was white and shaped like an egg, thus the name.
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| This forsythia likes bright sun just like eggplant. |
I also know that eggplant likes to grow in hot weather, and we tried growing it once when we lived in Houston. From our experiences before in New Orleans, we knew that gardening in the south was very different than the gardening we were familiar with further north. New Orleans and Houston, both, had long, HOT summers that turned out to be stressful to many vegetables we were familiar with.
Nevertheless, when Wally and Theo were little, we decided to try some vegetable gardening as a fun and educational activity for the family. Ward built a raised bed for square foot gardening in the backyard that we filled with a load of garden soil from a local landscaping company. We planted okra, tomatoes, and eggplant - all vegetables that like hot weather. Everything came up, but nothing thrived. While things grew, most things were stunted and funny colors taking on various shades of purple. We weren't sure what was going on, so we had the soil tested. It turns out that the soil was too nutrient rich--enough so that it was harming the plants and the only thing to do was to keeping planting things in the beds until the excess nutrients were used up. We tired that for a few years with little to show for it and eventually gave up. However, all was not lost on the gardening front. Wally still talks about the prolific cantaloupe plant that grew from the compost pile one year.
When we moved to Maryland, we tried our hand at family gardening with more success, but that's a story for another time that does not involve eggplants.
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| Eggplant would not grow well under the shade of this ornamental plum |
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| These daffodil will be long gone before any eggplant will ripen here. |
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| So will this one. |
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| White eggplant, like the color of these blossoms on this Bradford pear, is less bitter and smaller than purple eggplant. |
I made eggplant lasagma once. It was delicious.
ReplyDeleteI think when you take the sometimes bitter peel off and cover eggplant with sauce and cheese, it can be pretty good. I guess your lasagna proved that. Can you grow it in Oregon?
DeleteI like the way you framed the eggplant post! Kudos!
ReplyDeleteI love eggplant but am violently allergic to it. I would tempt fate and eat it occasionally anyway until the last time I ate it and felt like I had a mouthful of bees and some accompanying unpleasantness. Never again.,
Thanks. I am finding these posts harder to write than I thought they might be. I don't have a lot to say about most fruit and vegetables, so I have to improvise sometimes like in this post.
DeleteThat sounds like a strong deterrent from eating eggplant. Too bad since you like it. Do you have problems with anything else in the nightshade family like tomatoes or potatoes?
Thankfully tomatoes have no effect on me and I can tolerate potatoes, but I am mostly indifferent to them
DeleteI'm glad the whole nightshade family is not bad for you. As for potatoes--I'm not indifferent. I love them.
DeleteYou had me cracking up as I read this. I love your humor.
ReplyDeleteMy husband grows eggplant. I don't love it but he grills it and that's pretty yummy. He also makes some sort of veggie dish in a pot with tomatoes and who knows what other veggies and that's pretty good, as well. I think eggplant is pretty--something about the shape and color of it is appealing to me (like pears).
I mostly can take or leave eggplant, but I mostly leave it. However, I do like the shape and color of it, too. Although there is a purple variety that is shaped more like a cucumber than a pear.
DeleteOh, I like this post and how you tied in all your photos to the eggplant! Which is botanically considered to be a berry. Which is also called Aubergine (in the UK, etc.) or Brinjal (in South East Asia). The English word for eggplant in Sri Lanka was Brinjal; the Sinhalese word was Wambatu; it was long, narrow, and striped (purple and lilac streaks on white). There were also a small round green and white variety called thalana batu (also known as Thai eggplant) and an even smaller, green variety known as thibbatu (or pea eggplant; Solanum torvum). Both these smaller varieties are very bitter (bitterness comes from their seeds), so the seeds are removed as part of the cooking preparations. :)
ReplyDeleteYou know your eggplants! You would have been the perfect expert for this post. Do you ever grow them?
DeleteI tried growing them, once or twice, but, my plants didn't turn out well. I think it got too hot for them. However, neither my daughter nor I much care for eggplant, so, I haven't bothered trying to grow them after that.
DeleteWe eat eggplant a fair bit especially in curries. Having said that, I liked your flower photos better than pics of eggplants :)
ReplyDeletehttps://cassmobfamilyhistory.com/2021/04/06/etiquette-entertaining-and-electricity/