Deserving Eggplant June 1, 2010

Greetings Friends of the Farm,

In our first year of farming at our city farm, we grew a lot of eggplant. It was an extraordinarily successful crop.

Oddly, Cousin Claire and Larry soon disliked it.

It wasn’t that we grew such a tremendous quantity of it. We didn’t have fifteen beds planted, which might have suggested that we sported a great and uncontrollable addiction -- like that we possess for tomatoes. No, that first year we grew what, in my opinion, was a rather timid amount.

The interesting thing about eggplant in Texas -- which is either a wonderful aspect or a terrible one, depending on your relationship with the very sensuous looking fruit -- is if the crop is successful, the harvest will begin in June and not flounder until the first frost in November. That sort of steadfastness means that eggplant is constantly on our market tables during the hot season, and on our kitchen counter.

For a while, in addition to our crop here in Austin, Larry would grow some at the farm in Gause. For entertainment, the all-male harvest crew, consisting of Don Lupe, Don Martin, the two Penguins, and Larry, would often refer to the various varieties in a provocatively joking manner. Thank goodness, their pet names for the pendulous Black Beauties and Daesene Greens, or the elongated Ichibans or Orients were in Spanish. Although, in my view, that didn’t lessen the tawdriness of it at all.

But, boys will be boys, especially on a hot day under a hot sky, in the hot sand, surrounded by the hot woods, where on a sultry July or August afternoon, not a whisper of humid air can maneuver through the trees, and even if it could, its dampness would fail to neutralize the sweat running in rivulets down a body. So a lame joke here and there can be forgiven with a shake of the head: “those boys.”

In the very early 1990’s, we (or I, actually) vowed to eat from the farm, to buy nothing edible from a store.There were reasons for that dedication: we were very tight on funds, and our farm business was growing at a steady but slightly slow pace, partly because few folks knew of our existence, and eating local wasn’t a known concept. The only exception to the eat-from-the-farm rule was avocados. We bought those. That lapse became permanent the year I planted some avocado trees here in Austin, in an escalated attempt to eat nothing we didn’t produce. My greatest worry was their ability to make it through our winters (frequently down to fifteen degrees.) Instead, the vicious heat and drought of that summer fried the little trees one by one, no matter the water I gave them, no matter the little cup-towel tents I clothes-pinned over the tomato baskets for shade. It was a sobering period. The trees were hard to obtain; our extension agent had procured some, at great effort, so that we could “trial” them. I trialed them alright, trialed them to death. It was such a horrendous failure that I wanted no avocados from the store for many months. I didn’t deserve them.

I deserved eggplant. And, by innocent association, unfortunately, so did Larry and Cousin Claire.

Eggplant, from day one of our farming adventure, grew magnificently. Almost like it was squash growing in Wisconsin. You know, a place where the long days of sunshine and cool nights turn a tiny squash into a baseball bat in one day and the gardeners have to drive around at night, lobbing them into peoples’ back yards, onto their front porches, or stuffing them in mailboxes, just to avoid wasting them.

Now, eggplants in those northern regions grow huge too; you can see them, trucked down to the grocery stores here, looking like, well, I won’t say, as the only words coming to my mind from the “blue-ish” dim past are in Spanish and would warrant an “advisory warning” in red, at the top of this page.

Eggplant, down here on the frontier, individually grows to a size that is manageable. You don’t have to rearrange the shelves in your refrigerator to accommodate one, and two people can finish it off in a single meal.

Three people, Larry, Cousin Claire and I, can easily eat a Texas-sized “big one” a day. And that was the alluring solution to the early problem of growing them too successfully, as, alas, many of our customers weren’t yet big fans of eggplant.

So, rather than throw them at the neighbors’ front doors, we ate a lot of eggplant. At the first of the season in our first year, Larry and Cousin Claire seemed to like it, perhaps not a lot, but they didn’t gripe. But after a few months of it, almost every day, they began to complain. However, I was the slaving cook and thus I was also the “decider.” If eggplant was plentiful, and if we were to stay true to our/my commitment and our budget, then we would eat eggplant.

I did notice that, in the next eggplant season, there were suddenly “leftovers” and that Larry was cutting up and eating more tomatoes, blemish-free ones, really red ones, ones that we needed to be selling. And Claire was taking ever smaller portions of the dreaded eggplant preparation, effecting a “I’m kind of full” look.

On the advent of the subsequent year’s eggplant deluge, they pretty much refused to eat it more than once a week. And finally, in defeat, after a few years, and after our harvest list grew more abundant and varied, I quit cooking eggplant.

The eggplant-antagonists got no eggplant for quite a while, until last year. I was shocked, but alone at the other farm, Larry had begun slicing a large eggplant lengthwise into 1/4” slabs, and sauteing them in salted butter in an iron skillet. Who could not like eggplant and butter? Butter makes everything taste better! Today, besotted with that culinary memory, he can’t wait for our eggplant to be ready for harvest.

Oops, wouldn’t you know? The much maligned eggplant has had a tough time in the last couple of years. Last year, the heat made it hard for the blooms to set fruit, and this year, the transplants suffered a bit of “stunting” when the greenhouse got too cold. That perilous night set them up for the infestation they now suffer.

Lace Bugs.

Larry and I had never experienced, nor even heard of Lace Bugs, but we learned their name when we researched the horrible little “things” and their equally horrid brown, stained-damage evidence on the undersides of the eggplants’ leaves.

Flea beetles, tiny jumping/flying black insects, always assault eggplant, and typically, we  do nothing, as they are usually a “cosmetic plague” and the plants grow out of the problem. The hairy woolie worms (black, white and yellow, officially named the Salt Marsh caterpillar), eat chunks out of the leaves, and we brush off and squash these worms that no chicken will touch.

But the Lace Bugs. Wow. They are tormenting our eggplant! So the revived eggplant-lover and I collected a couple of infected leaves, held them under a magnifying glass, successfully saw their lace-like wings and brown dotted heads, and were appropriately horrified. This morning son Tom sprayed them with a concoction of horticultural oil, orange oil, molasses, seaweed, soap, and water.


Oh we felt so much better, but we’ll have to examine the leaves every day, to see if any of the bugs survived, and if so, we’ll spray again. The plants are blooming; their fruits will need their leaves for energy and shade.

Yes, the rejuvenated eggplant-lover is anticipating a buttered eggplant dish, almost as much as he looks forward to eating many, many summer tomatoes. Regarding Cousin Claire, hmmm, I’m not sure she has recovered from her aversion.

Carol Ann