Saturday Spotlight – Bonica Eggplant

I have been growing Bonica eggplants for a few years now and so far they’ve never let me down.  Bonica is a pretty standard large purple oval shaped eggplant, not dissimilar to those that you see in the shops.

Eggplant is one of those weird veg that definitely tastes much better when you grow your own but is hard to describe in what way.  Fresher somehow and richer.  Hmm I’m really not doing a great job in describing the taste am I?  Perhaps I’d better stick with how I grew them:

This year I sowed seed at the very end (the 30th) of June.  I potted up the seedlings before planting them out in October.  I harvested my first fruits on the 26th of January.  This year I planted the eggplants in a part of the garden that gets  partial sun (about 6-7 hours of sun a day).  I have kept them well fed and watered.  I find that eggplants do like a bit of food.  A friend of mine has a plant which I gave her from the same batch of seedlings.  She planted it out in an old bed without fertilising or adding fresh food in any form and it just hasn’t grown at all.  Its still about 20cm high and hasn’t flowered let alone fruited.

So far my 2 Bonica plants have produced 5kg of fruit and I estimate that I’ve harvested about a third of what the plants should eventually produce.  I suspect the yield would be higher if I was able to grow them in full sun.

I have also grown Bonica in pots in the past.  Whilst the plants didn’t get as big and the yield was not as large as ones grown in the ground they still did well and fruited nicely.  Personally I think they make quite attractive pot plants.

I always stake my eggplants regardless of where I plant them as the fruits tend to weigh the branches down quite considerably.

Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate a linky plugin for WordPress that actually works so instead I will put links to your posts in mine.  If you write a Spotlight then let me know in the comments and I will link to it in both this and next weeks posts.  Just as a warning – I have quite a hectic weekend planned so it may take me a while to add them on this one occasion.

In case you missed them other Saturday Spotlights to date include:

Our Happy Acres – Oakleaf lettuce

Seed to Table – Golden Corn Salad

Suburban Tomato – Yugoslav Tomatoes

Suburban Tomato – Majestic Butter Beans

And the newest additions:

Our Happy Acres – Purple Queen Bush Bean which if nothing else is worthy of investigation for the rhyming name alone.

City Garden, Country Garden – Sorrel

My Little Garden Project – Big Rainbow Tomato

Garden Glut – Minnesota Midget Melons