in the plant profile series of videos
today we will look at growing the listada de Gandia eggplant we will look at how
to grow this eggplant variety in raised beds and we also have a delicious recipe
for you
eggplants are summer vegetables and we recommend that you start eggplants in
seed starting kids 6 to 8 weeks before you plan to transplant them so we're
starting our seeds here in January in Southern California and the seed
starting mix that we have used is a combination of peat moss and perlite and
this makes a great seed starting mix and all you do is sow one or two seeds per
cell and then you can thin them out if needed I just transplant them even if
there are multiple plants sometimes and you can see that within six weeks the
plants have emerged and they're looking very nice the leaves are very healthy
and at this stage you can add a weak fertilizer to fertilize your seedlings
something like what you see on your screen here and these will grow very
well you can even use compost tea
and eight weeks since sowing the seeds we are now ready to transplant our
seedlings now we will be transplanting our seedlings on this raised bed and
this raised bed has a lot of organic matter as you can see we mixed a lot of
homemade compost we also have a lot of leaves here on this raised bed and we're
going to be transplanting these seedlings in two rows in this raised bed
and you can even grow this eggplant variety in containers they grow very
well in containers as well I had this raised bed where I was growing a couple
of pepper plants at the back and I have two rows available where I'm gonna be
planting these seedlings so as you can see here we choose a sunny spot
eggplants need about eight hours of Sun a day they need full Sun
and 16 weeks in sowing you can see that the plants have become really nice and
healthy when the plants are starting out you need to provide it with a lot of
high nitrogen fertilizers so that it can develop good foliage and once they start
flowering you need to switch to a low nitrogen fertilizer I have mentioned
this step and many of my previous videos they apply to tomatoes and they apply to
eggplants as well eggplants prefer a pH of about 5 point 5 to 6 and you can do a
soil test to determine your soil pH you can see that the eggplants have started
forming now and once the eggplant starts sending out blooms if you don't have a
lot of pollinators in your garden make sure that your hand pollinating your
eggplants it's a very important step and getting a lot of eggplants in your
garden you can see here the eggplants are now growing very well and the
blossoms are also pretty abundant here now pruning is a very important step
that you need to do for your eggplant and what you need to do is prune the
suckers which come out from the bottom part of the eggplant and you might not
see these till like plant is about four feet or so tall and once you see these
suckers coming out you need to make sure that you remove them they're useless
parts of the plant they don't have any use they just use the energy from the
plant to produce leaves which we do not want for your eggplant so just make sure
that you remove the leaves from the bottom as well the dead leaves and the
suckers that you see here even if they're a little thicker it's okay to
remove them and here you can see it's pretty much useless they just grow out
from the bottom part of the plant and they do not really produce anything now
eggplants are very susceptible to spider mites so pruning and removing dead
leaves from the bottom helped prevent the spider mite issues with most
eggplants
and here you can see that 22 weeks and sowing the seeds we are now ready to
harvest our eggplants now there is no right or wrong time to harvest the
eggplants the eggplants do get very big but no matter when you harvest it you
will be able to enjoy your eggplants whether they are small or whether they
are large there's no real right time as such to harvest the eggplants now I
usually wait till the eggplant is quite sizable so that at least i can use the
eggplant for a lot of dishes it should not be too small unless of course you're
growing an eggplant that is supposed to be small but these eggplants the
listada de gandia eggplants as you can see here they grew to about this size and this is
the perfect time to harvest them they won't have like thick seeds when they
reach this size and they look very beautiful they do have thorns on the top
part of the plant so be careful when you're handling them but it's a
beautiful looking eggplant as you can see here and we were able to harvest a
lot of eggplants I usually harvest about three or four eggplant from my plant
each time we need to use them
and while you harvest the eggplant you might notice some diseases with them and
there are a lot of ways to take care of these diseases one of them is to use a
spray an organic spray that takes care of all the pests on the eggplants like
spider mites and aphids and all the other pests you can also use neem oil if
you want to kill all these pests that come on these eggplants do not use any
chemical pesticides I strongly recommend that you stay away from them they cause
a lot of problems for the bee population and it's best you stay away from these
chemical options and now let's look at how the eggplant looks like when you cut
open the eggplant this is a step that I usually show after my harvest videos
so that you can see how the vegetables or fruits look like and here you can see
that this eggplant is a little thick-skinned it's not as thin as
something like the black beauty or the regular black eggplant that you grow the
purple eggplant but you can see here from the inside there are very few seeds
and I usually like eggplants without a lot of seeds and the earlier you harvest
them the better chances you have that there are no seeds present in the
eggplant and what I usually do is I dice these eggplants and then I'm going to
quickly show you a eggplant recipe that's really delicious so what you need
to do is keep the diced eggplants in a container add some turmeric powder chili
powder and salt and let them sit for about 30 minutes or so the eggplant
absorbs all the flavors of the spices during this step and it also separates
all the water now take a pan and heat some oil in it and inside this pan
you're gonna add some mustard seeds, some lentils
you can add the diced eggplants as you can see here and after you add the
eggplants make sure that you store them very well and this will help them absorb
all the oils that are there on the pan and all the spices
and do not cover the pan because eggplants have a lot of water in them
you just want to make sure that you keep stirring them throughout this process
and it's really a very simple recipe you just keep stirring them you can add a
little bit more oil if needed but if you don't like a lot of oil if you want to
just avoid using a lot of oil you can do that I like to shallow fry it a little
bit so that they very crispy and crunchy and here you can see that once the
eggplant starts cooking you can actually smell all the flavors of the eggplant
now I know a lot of you don't like eggplants or don't eat a lot of
eggplants but if you try to prepare eggplants in the right way you might get
a liking for eggplants they're very delicious and here is a plant summary
for the listada de Gandia eggplant so there we have it folks that was our
episode on the plant profile for the listada de gandia
eggplant let us know if you have tried growing this eggplant variety
before and if you have any comments or questions put them in the comments box
below we'll see you again soon happy gardening