How to Grow Eggplant

Solanum melongena · Also called: Aubergine, Brinjal, Baingan, Begun, Kathiri, Vangi, Melongene, Garden egg

Two long glossy deep purple eggplant fruit hanging on a plant, each attached by a short thick stalk to a green cap with visible spines, among large dull green leaves, with a bamboo cane and a tie visible behind them.

Photo: Joanbanjo, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Eggplant is one of the most productive vegetables a small plot can carry. One planting keeps bearing for months rather than giving a single harvest, so a few rows feed a household and sell a basket every few days through a long season. China and India grow most of the world's crop, and it is a staple vegetable across South and South East Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and much of Africa. It also tolerates heat and some drought better than tomato does, which makes it the reliable crop in seasons when tomato fails. Its weakness is a single insect. In much of Asia a caterpillar that bores into the shoots and then into the fruit is the reason eggplant is among the most heavily sprayed vegetables grown, and learning to manage it without reaching for a spray every week is the most valuable thing in this guide.

Growing Eggplant, Stage by Stage

1. Get the land ready — Choose warm, sunny, well-drained ground that has not carried a nightshade crop recently, and work in organic matter because this plant stands there for months.
2. Choose and raise your seedlings — Raise seedlings in a warm protected bed rather than sowing straight into the field, because the seedling stage is slow and this is where most crops are lost.
3. Plant out — Move seedlings into warm ground in the cool of the day, space them widely because each becomes a bush, and put the stake in at planting rather than later.
4. Water — Water steadily rather than heavily, because this crop sets and fills fruit continuously and swings between dry and flooded are what split and deform them.
5. Weeds, feeding and support — Keep the crop clean while it is small, feed it in small amounts repeatedly because it fruits for months, and tie it up before the weight of fruit pulls it over.
6. Flowering, and the borer that decides the crop — From the first flowers you are watching for a caterpillar that bores into shoots and then into fruit, and finding it in the shoots is the whole of the control.
7. Harvest — Pick while the skin is still glossy and the flesh springs back, cut the tough stalk with a knife, and keep picking every few days or the plant stops.
8. Keep it fresh, and store the seed — Eggplant bruises easily and does not like real cold, so keep it cool and shaded and move it quickly, and save seed only from a fully over-ripe fruit of a good plant.

Common Problems & Troubleshooting

If you see: Growing shoot tips wilting and drooping over while the rest of the plant looks healthy, and small holes in the fruit near the green cap, sometimes plugged with dark droppings.

It likely means: A caterpillar that bores into the soft shoot first and later into the fruit. It is inside the plant, which is why the damage appears before you ever see the insect.

Do this: Cut off every wilted shoot tip below the damage and carry it right out of the field. Dropping it between the rows lets the caterpillar walk back.

If you see: A healthy-looking plant that wilts completely within a day or two and never recovers overnight, with the leaves still green rather than yellow, and a cut stem base that oozes a milky thread when held in clear water.

It likely means: A bacterial disease living in the soil that blocks the plant's water channels. There is no cure, it survives in the ground for years and it builds up under any nightshade crop.

Do this: Pull out and remove affected plants including their roots, and do not compost them on ground you intend to plant again.

If you see: Plants that have become small-leaved, pale, upright and unusually bushy with many thin shoots, producing distorted flowers or none at all, and no fruit whatever the season.

It likely means: A disease spread by small sap-sucking insects that makes the plant grow shoots instead of fruit. There is no spray that cures a plant showing it.

Do this: Pull out and remove affected plants as soon as you are confident, because they are the source from which the insects carry it to the rest.

If you see: Plenty of purple flowers opening and then dropping off with their stalks a day or two later, leaving no small fruit behind, on large healthy dark green bushes.

It likely means: Either the weather is too hot or too cold for fruit to set, or the plant has been given too much nitrogen and is making leaf instead of fruit.

Do this: Look at the feeding first. Heavy nitrogen alone reliably produces this, and the cure is to stop rather than to add something else.

If you see: Fruit that has lost its shine and gone dull or yellowish-brown, feels light for its size, and is full of hard brown seed and bitter when cut open.

It likely means: The fruit was left on the plant too long. Eggplant is picked while immature, and the eating stage is well before the fruit is botanically ripe.

Do this: Pick every two or three days rather than once a week, because fruit goes from perfect to past it in a few days in warm weather.

If you see: Leaves curling downwards, going bronze or speckled and dropping early, with fine webbing under the leaves or clouds of tiny white insects rising when you shake a plant.

It likely means: Sap-sucking pests such as mites, whitefly or aphids. They multiply fastest in hot dry conditions and on plants pushed hard with nitrogen.

Do this: Look under the leaves rather than on top, because that is where all of these live and where you will see them first.

If you see: Seedlings in the nursery bed toppling over with a thin, dark, pinched patch on the stem right at soil level, spreading outwards in a patch from where it started.

It likely means: Damping off, a fungus that attacks seedlings at soil level. It thrives where seed is sown thickly, the bed is kept too wet, and air does not move.

Do this: Sow more thinly next time and raise the nursery bed so water drains away from it.

Yield & Market Value

Growing the crop is only part of the job. The last part is knowing what a normal harvest looks like where you are, and knowing what your fruit is worth before you agree a price with anybody.

Remember It This Way

If you forget every other page of this guide, keep these lines. They are the whole crop, in order, short enough to carry in your head.

Never after tomato, potato, chilli or tobacco. The wilts live in the soil.
Raise seedlings warm. Cold nurseries give weak plants that never catch up.
Stake at planting, not later. A later stake tears the roots.
Space them wide. Each one becomes a heavy bush.
Walk the crop twice a week from the first flower.
A drooping shoot tip has a caterpillar inside it. Cut it out.
Carry cut shoots out of the field. Dropped ones walk back.
Pick glossy. Dull skin means you already left it too long.
Press it. If the dent stays, it is past its best.
One over-ripe fruit left on tells the whole plant to stop.

Test Yourself: Identification

How do I know when this glossy dark purple fruit hanging under a spiny green cap is ready to pick?

What is this crop of spreading grey-green bushes with large lobed leaves and small purple flowers, grown in widely spaced rows?

What are these big soft lobed grey-green leaves and small purple star-shaped flowers on a knee-high branching plant?

Honest Limits of This Guide

Eggplant kinds differ enormously in fruit shape, size and colour, and markets are specific about which they want. This guide teaches the plant rather than any kind, and what your buyers actually ask for is better information than anything written here.
Every timing in this guide is given in weeks and months rather than in dates, because the right planting date depends entirely on your own warm season. Eggplant sown into cold ground gives a weak patchy crop, and the month that is right in one place is wrong a few hundred kilometres away.
No product, spray or dose is named anywhere in this guide. Eggplant is eaten fresh, waiting times before picking matter, what is registered differs by country and changes, and using something not registered can make fruit unsellable or unsafe. Ask a licensed dealer and follow the label.
The yield figures here are wide ranges drawn from national averages and they will not predict your plot. How often you pick, and whether the shoot and fruit borer was managed, matter more than anything else in this guide.

Sources

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy species-match record for Solanum melongena L. — Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Copenhagen (source)
EPPO Global Database — Solanum melongena (EPPO code SOLME) — European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO), Paris (source)
FAOSTAT crops and livestock products — production data for eggplants (aubergines) — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome (source)
Solanum melongena (aubergine) — CABI Compendium datasheet — CABI, Wallingford (source)
Leucinodes orbonalis (eggplant fruit and shoot borer) — CABI Compendium datasheet — CABI, Wallingford (source)

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