This year, our tiny backyard garden produced many heads of crisp n’ tart lettuce and a bumper crop of sweet n’ juicy tomatoes. However, our eggplant crop was atrocious, probably due to the plant’s delayed move from the seed-starting pots to their final resting place in the garden. We should not have waited until the first week of August. The seedlings’ diligent growth in the hot sun seemed promising, but alas, blooms did not appear until Labor Day. And though the warm weather held up through September, the eggplants seemed reluctant to yield any fruit. Then, last week, we noticed a deep-purple bulb cowering under a mess of floppy leaves, and another one on a neighboring plant! Two eggplant fruits, round and squat rather than oblong and smooth, harvested from a total of eight hardy-looking eggplants that are now in bad shape after last Sunday’s snowy Nor’easter.
Honestly, these eggplants don’t look right to me. They look as if they came from very constipated plants.
The Fruits of Our Constipated Eggplants
