The Magical Growing Eggplant

Growing up, we did not grow a lot of vegetables as a family.

 

I vaguely remember something about occasionally half-heartedly trying to grow banana peppers and maybe tomatoes one summer as a child, but they didn’t really take off and therefore neither did our interest in them.

 

Last year a friend posted about the sale that the Georgia Blind Academy has, and tomatoes and such were as low as a dollar each for a whole plant. And off we went. We had so many tomatoes that the vines grew up and above the thrown together trellis and I was able to grow more full-sized plants from the cuttings. The cucumbers also took off enough that my son, picky eater that he is, even began to like eating them (not so much for the maters).

 

So this year, I went a little bananas with my garden purchases. Four sets of Juliet tomatoes, two sets of cucumbers, eggplants, okra, and watermelon. Then, later, more heirloom tomatoes from farmers markets.

 

 

The eggplant was the more mysterious plant to me. I really had no idea what to expect from it! I honestly thought it had died when some kind of bug ate away at its leaves. Both the one planted in the ground and the one in a pot.

 

Then, like a miracle, a tiny little purple flower emerged. It developed as a bud, then opened up, then closed up again, and opened up again before falling off.

 

From there, a little white thing has started to develop. I can only assume it will, eventually, also turn purple.

 

These things I’m learning may seem obvious to others, but whenever I see them for the first time and point them out to my kids for the first time… it’s like a little spark is ignited in each of us. Just like whenever we watch a new cucumber grow, or find a once hidden strawberry, or even stumble across the watermelon that somehow seemed to appear out of nowhere.

 

There’s nothing quite like growing things for the first time, or the second, or more.

 

Love to all y’all,

 

Molly