How to grow eggplants

Eggplant is a warm-season fruiting plant in the nightshade family, related to tomatoes and peppers, with woody stems and violet, star-shaped flowers that open into glossy, heavy-skinned fruit. Gardeners grow it for that fruit, roasted, grilled, or stewed into dishes across Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Asian cuisines, and because a handful of plants can hold a sunny corner of the garden all summer while producing steadily. The plant grows into a small, semi-woody shrub rather than sprawling like a vine, and its branches can grow heavy enough with fruit to bend or snap without support.

The hardest part of growing eggplant well is keeping the plant upright once it starts carrying a full load of fruit. University of Maryland Extension lists lodging, the plant toppling over with broken branches, among the most common problems home gardeners face. A second-year gardener who skips staking at transplanting, assuming a compact plant will not need it, often finds out only once several fruits are near full size, when a summer thunderstorm or a hard gust snaps a main stem at the soil line. The broken branch and everything growing on it are lost outright, and the plant stays more exposed for the rest of the season.