I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we're going to talk about managing eggplants. While eggplants may not be one
of the favorite vegetables in the vegetable garden, it is one that people
like to grow a little bit. And if you've grown eggplants you know that they do
have some problems: they tend to be very very bushy and they get spider mites
very easily. So I have some things that I do in my garden to help manage those
spider mite problems and also make it a little bit easier to harvest the
eggplants. So pull into the garden here into the...look at the eggplants and kind
of about the physical structure of the eggplants and what I do to manage them
and make them easier to produce a good eggplant crop. So you can see on this
eggplant this is actually the first fruit of the first flower that's coming
up; they grow a lot like the bush tomatoes do, or most any tomatoes
actually, you've got a main stem that comes up and that main stem will produce
a fruit and then you have these branches or suckers off from that. Now each of
these branches will produce a fruit but as they keep producing they get very
full - you've got lots of branches in there - a little bit hard to manage. So
what I do is I come up to this first fruit on the eggplant and then I cut off
a lot of these suckers down below. So you can see the main stem coming up here and
you can see where these side branches are attaching; you can you can actually
see the the seam on those side branches. So this may look like I'm cutting off a
lot, and in reality I am, but these will come back and it will be a lot easier to
manage as it gets bigger. This main branch comes up - we've got the side
branch the main branch - and I'll put a cage around it to contain it, but then I
don't get all this mess down below that makes a mess. So this plant has actually
got a pretty nice eggplant, these oriental eggplants you want to harvest
them when they're quite young, otherwise the seeds get
carried away on them. So this is actually ready to harvest, but you can see on this
one that I've pruned coming up the main stem and then it branches just below
this first fruit; all the branches below that I've taken
out, all these branches up above I'll let them go. As we look at this eggplant
we'll see that you've got the flower and that main stem goes up this way, and then
we have that first stem below the flower; that's the one we're going to keep.
Everything else down here we take out, everything else up here we leave so
it'll get bushy - it'll get plenty bushy - we're just going to take out everything
down low so that it makes it more manageable. As you go through the growing
season you'll see that it will want to send out suckers, some new growth there
some new sprouts, so just break those off. As you go through the season
check your plants every couple weeks, break off any new growth, and you'll keep
that clean underneath so that's a way to keep it managed. So now I've got these
homemade cages but they work really quite well, got this cage set around it
and the eggplant will grow up in here. I'll be able to reach in through the
wires and harvest my eggplant and I won't be worried about all this stuff
down low. Then as the leaves get old, we'll take the old leaves off and
they'll be less susceptible to spider mite invasion and things like that, and
we'll keep it cleaned up, able to harvest well so that's one way to manage your
eggplant. While eggplants may not be one of our favorite vegetable plants some
people like a little bit of eggplant, this just makes it a little more
manageable to prune those up and make it so that you can get access to the fruit.
So there you have it: just another way to have fun in your garden.