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  • From: road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] eggplant crop problems
  • Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:37:11 -0400


On Aug 30, 2005, at 12:17 PM, Ploughshare wrote:

We are in Central MN. This year everything came on early and beautiful.
However, this is the first year our eggplant petered out well before the
frost(especially the japanese varieties). It wasn't a huge harvest even at
the peak. Anyone experience the same thing?
--Gary


I had an early and heavy start to harvest; after which a dead stop for about a month; almost no bloom, almost no fruit. A couple of weeks ago they started to bloom again, and it looks as if there may be a heavy fall crop (in time to get at least much of it ahead of the frost, I hope).

Weather during the failure to bloom was very dry and hot (for this area) with daytime temperatures most of the time in the 80's and 90's, night temperatures in the 60's and 70's. Does anybody know the maximum temperature for bloom on eggplant? As it's near tropical in origin to the best of my knowledge, this seems an unlikely source of the problem; but these are short-season varieties that will produce in a more normal year up here. The recent fruit set began after weather turned somewhat cooler, but the drought had not let up, and irrigation water was in shorter supply; though there had been enough of a brief shower to wet the leaves well one night. Most hot and sweet pepper varieties were doing well, except for sunscald; but the fruitset on most of these was probably before the worst of the heat wave. It's not a varietal problem on the eggplant, as it happened to all eight varieties more or less simultaneously.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale



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