You may be wondering about my post image of the eggplant with a paintbrush. I’m hoping that little brush will help with eggplant production. When your eggplant flowers keep falling off, you may need a little paintbrush too.
For many months now I have had an eggplant “tree” growing in my garden. I’m not familiar with growing eggplants. In my New England yard I think I tried a few times and picked maybe one eggplant from my own garden! The plants never grew very large – maybe a couple feet high. Here in Florida, my eggplant has become a small tree. And this photo was taken AFTER I pruned big branches off the thing!
Because of the warm climate, vegetable plants just go on living for many, many months. I am not used to that. The New Hampshire growing season was very short. When frost and freezes don’t happen, I suppose the plants could go on living forever. I don’t know. Does that happen? I thought vegetable plants were only good for one season.
The plant produced many little purple flowers, and I kept hoping to see the dark purple vegetable pop out, but it never happened …. until just recently.
I figured there might be something wrong, since the plant itself is healthy and big. It gets plenty of water and sun. The weather has been hot, so I attributed the lack of fruit to that. However, the days have become cooler and now that one eggplant had set, I hoped to see more. That is not happening. All the other flowers are still falling off.
I searched online and found a helpful article at Gardening Know How, which told me that lack of pollination may be the problem.
So this morning I went out with my little paint brush and swished it around inside some of the flowers. This is what that article said to do. Now I’ll wait and see if I get more eggplants forming. (Update: this did not help. I never got any more eggplants – that season – Read what happened the second year.)
I don’t love to eat eggplant, but I would definitely use them in a stir fry or vegetable lasagna dish. I just need this big plant to give me something to cook with!
In the meantime, I am using green peppers daily. I never thought I could grow them, but it appears I just had to wait.
Thank you for sharing!
Hydrangeas Blue 
Hi! This sounds and looks exactly what’s happening to my eggplant now. It’s big and producing flowers that look just like yours, but eventually they just fall off instead of producing fruit. I am in a zone 6 with days as high as 75-80 degrees and nights low as 55-60 degrees. The plant gets full sun. What am I doing wrong? I have not tried hand pollination, and I water deeply every 3 days. Thank you for your time! Stay safe.
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Hi Samantha, Honestly I don’t think I ever figured out the secret to growing eggplant. Here in central Florida my plant grew to be like a small tree, but I only ever had about 3 eggplant from it. Sorry I can’t be more help, and I wish you luck!
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