Botanically known as Solanum melongena, this beautiful purple vegetable is called aubergine in Europe, eggplant in America and brinjal in the Subcontinent. Locally known as baingan, it belongs to the nightshade family Solanaceae.

A great vehicle for flavour and spice, aubergines are popular in several cuisines and cultures. Locally, this spongy, absorbent vegetable is prepared as the delicious Hyderabadi bhagaray baingan, cooked with meat or potatoes in curries, and fried up as fritters.

Call it by any name, this highly nutritious vegetable takes its time to grow but is worth the effort in every way.

Eggplant, as the name denotes, is egg shaped, but aubergines can be long, pear-shaped or round in varying shades of purple, pink, green, white, yellow and also stripy purple and white ones.

This warm-weather purple-hued vegetable may have a long growing season, but it’s worth the wait to grow, and to eat it home-grown

In Karachi, the seeds for aubergine should ideally be sown between February to March and then from July to August. April to June may be too hot for the seeds to germinate but, if germination takes place, the seedlings are likely to be weak and unable to survive. This also applies to any other area belonging to the cold hardiness Zone 10 (+4.4°C to -1.1°C) having hardly one to two months of winter.

It is better to initially sow seeds in a small container such as a paper cup. Start off by growing two seedlings and, after thinning out the weaker seedling, transplant the stronger one into a 10-inch container or pot. Ideally, it should be transplanted in the ground. The plant reaches a height of around two to maximum four feet and its spread is around two to three feet.

Aubergine is a sun-loving plant and requires maximum exposure to direct sunlight from morning to late afternoon, and this is one of the reasons it thrives so well in Karachi. A minimum of six hours of sunlight is required daily. The plant should be watered daily so that the soil stays moist through the day.

The plant is very prone to diseases and pests. It is, therefore, recommended that, from the very beginning, as soon as the true leaves erupt, the plant should be continuously sprayed with organic pesticide every 10 to 15 days.

When it comes to plant nourishment, the provision of different fertilisers can be divided as per different stages of plant growth. From the early stage, when the true leaves begin to grow till the time the plant flowers, organic nitrogen fertiliser should be added. This can be in the form of decomposed cow manure dung, compost tea or decomposed chicken manure.

During the flowering and fruiting stages, nitrogen provision must be stopped. The aubergine plant is a very heavy feeder during the fruiting stage, especially the plants being grown in containers or pots. This is the time to start with organic potassium and organic phosphorus fertilisers. Organic fertilisers can easily be made at home or purchased from gardening stores.

Each aubergine flower has both an anther and pistil, the male and female reproductive parts of the flower respectively. Hand pollination is commonly used by kitchen gardeners to pollinate and fertilise aubergine flowers. A gentle tap on the base of the flower where it is attached to the stalk will ensure that the pollen disperses from the anther of the flower to the stigma part of pistil, thereby completing all the steps of pollination. Wind and honey-bees also help in pollination.

Another method is to take a brush and gently move it inside any of the aubergine flowers and, then, move the same brush within the insides of any other flowers in the aubergine plant.

It fruits throughout the year, but more during the months of August and September. When adopting organic measures and growing in small containers, fruiting is likely to be smaller than commercially grown aubergines that are available in the market. In this case, removing a few fruits from the plant can boost and augment the size of other aubergines left on the plant.

About four aubergine plants grown in containers at home are enough to provide a meal-equivalent yield for a four-member family every fortnight. But it takes around at least 60 to 70 days from germination to the first actual fruiting that can be harvested.

Please send your queries and emails to kalishahid@hotmail.com. The writer is a physician and a host for the YouTube channel ‘DocTree Gardening’ promoting organic kitchen gardening

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 11th, 2022