Celebrating Life in a Garden City

The interesting Oriental eggplant variety “Lucky Green” which I got from the Taiwanese seed company, Known You, has started to flower and fruit… Below is the description of this hybrid given by the seed company at its website:

“Plant is semi tall, spreading, and early. The fruit is long, fruit end is pointy, rind and calyx are green with a few thorns. The flesh is white green, with good flavor. The fruit is about 38 by 4 cm, 200g in weight, and good for shipping.”

Oriental eggplants are long and slim, in contrast to eggplants from other localities. Locally here, they are mostly known as brinjals. Those that are green are hard to come to by and most of the brinjals we eat here are those purple ones. As given in the description above, Lucky Green produces green fruits! Many visitors who walk into the garden are quite pleasant surprised when they saw the green fruits.

At the community garden, Lucky Green started to fruit at a short height of about 1 and half foot (45 cm) and it took the usual maturity period – nearly three months - indicated by the appearance of its first flowers. It flowers and sets fruit at nearly all the forks of the branches. Fruits are harvested based on the expected length of the fruits (given by the label) rather than counting the number of days.

Eggplant flowers, in general, are violet in colour and very pretty. They usually appear in a small cluster. My gardeners and I did not deliberately pollinate the flowers and we left it to Mother Nature to help us do that. Apartment dwellers may face some problems with fruit set due to the lack of pollinators in the growing area. One can attempt to use a paintbrush to brush the anthers of the flowers so as to transfer the pollen to the pistils. If you have ants in the growing area, sometimes as they visit the flowers for nectar, they also help to pollinate the flowers for you.

Coming to the sad portion of this blog post…  As the plants fruited over the recent Lunar New Year weekend, many young fruits have been stolen by passers-by to my open-concept community garden. My community gardeners haven’t got a chance to taste a fruit yet! Just this week, I have been told one of our seven Lucky Green eggplant shrubs have been dug out and taken away.

The flower bud of the eggplant.

One opened blossom of the eggplant.

A young fruit of the Lucky Green oriental eggplant.

Almost ready for harvest, but it got stolen before my gardeners were able to the pick it…