Monday, April 4, 2011

Growing Brinjal (Eggplant)


Getting Started. Making your own Seeds.

Eggplant or Brinjals are not hard to grow. They could be easily grown from seeds one gets from the vegetable. It would be good if a fully mature vegetable is used to obtain the seeds, as then the probability of a seed to germinate increases.

Getting a good mature vegetable is first step. Take out the seeds, soak them in water and then let them dry for a day in bright sunlight. You now have seeds ready to be planted.

Planting Brinjal

There's no specific season to plant brinjal. It can be grown all the year round, as long as you water the plants regularly, and add manure on timely basis.

Time Period

Brinjal plants generally grow to a height of 1-2 feet. They start giving fruits in 4-5 months if well pollinated.

Space Requirements

Each Eggplant (Brinjal as we know it) should be given around 1 sq feet area. While growing it in containers or in flower pots, it would be wise to have one such plant per container.


Pollination

Since the Brinjal have both, male and female portion in each flower(same as in Tomato), there isn't much role of insects in pollination of tomato plants. This does not mean they are not needed, but its just that their role is reduced as compared to their work needed in say, Pumpkin pollen pollination. I did not get a single vegetable out of my brinjal plant for almost 6 months, but when I manually pollinated the flowers, in a fortnight, I had 4 small brinjals! Manual pollination is really easy, it simply requires you to shake the flowers and making sure that the center(female) part of the flower gets some pollens from the side(male) part of the flower. Believe me, doing manual pollination does give results fast.

Care

I water my brinjal plant once in the evening. Also, I added some 'ash' into soild, which is black material which one gets after burning wood. It responded to it well, and I didn't need any chemical fertilizer after that.

Little fertilizer can help if the plant is not growing well. However, I am a big fan of using non-industrial fertilizer, and try to refrain from using them, unless really necessary. My compost is getting prepared, and once ready, I would use it to grow brinjals. Would update the results then. Another thing, brinjal plants have a lifespan of almost 2-3 years.

Output

A brinjal plant can yield almost 4-5 brinjals in a season, or more.

Results

Let the images speak for themselves

3 comments:

  1. Pl.suggest about fertilizer for brinjal and tomato.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Homemade kitchen west composed + banana peel dry powder sometimes add vermicompd.

      Delete
  2. Using cow ding cakes, or using compost created from home organic waste is best

    ReplyDelete