E is for Eggplant

 

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. 

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.  

Eggplant would not grow well under the shade of this ornamental plum

These daffodil will be long gone before any eggplant will ripen here.

So will this one.

White eggplant, like the color of these blossoms on this Bradford pear,
is less bitter and smaller than purple eggplant.