Growing brinjal / eggplant in the house

Eggplant can be used in a variety of ways in cooking, whether it is fried, or baked, or made into a dry dish or curry (there are innumerable recipes that are available online, as per your taste). There are many different varieties of eggplant that can be cooked - there are the popular purple oval shaped ones (can be small size or real large sized ones), you have long purple and long green, you have white ones, you have ones where the eggplant crown has thorns on it, and so on. The eggplant is a great plant to grow in your home garden, since it very easily grows and is not frustrating like some other plants that you can provide immense love, care and nutrition and they might still fall flat some day.

Long slender green eggplant growing in home garden / More Photos / Print this photo

I grow my eggplant in bucket like containers with the depth being atleast 12 inches. I used to earlier grow the eggplant in much smaller containers, reasoning it out that I can provide extra nutrition. However, that scheme really did not work out that well, and I am now ensuring that in order to get some good fruiting for the kitchen, there is a need to ensure that the plant gets enough nutrition and soil space in order to grow and fruit well.

These grow bags are not good enough to grow large veggies in / More photos / Print this photo

So, this year, the existing plants were pruned and moved into buckets with more soil and more nutrition. It takes some time for the result to come out, but as of now, I can see some of the plants becoming more productive. The plants were not very big last time, so am further waiting to see whether the plant will get bigger, since that would mean more flowers and hence more eggplants on the plant over a period of time. We are self-sufficient in eggplant, but with more, and especially organically grown eggplant, the concept of being able to share such eggplants with friends and family members will be good. The hope is that other people, seeing these plants growing, will get enthused on their own and also start growing eggplant in their houses; and since eggplant grows pretty easily, it is a good large fruit to start with.

Eggplant transplanted into plastic buckets at the back / More photos / Print of this photo

One of the problems that can cause starting frustration with growing eggplant is that the first set of flowers do not convert into fruit; it is only after a few weeks that these flowers actually start converting into fruit and start the production of eggplant.