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Vegetable Gardening

Eggplant grown from seeds

14 years ago

One of the white eggplant that I bought last year got dark yellow with some rot last year so I let it aside for seeds. It was not easy extracting the seeds from them but I managed to pull 30 or so what seemed like a tiny tomato seeds from it. I put them on a pot about a month ago and now I have about 20 small plants, about 2 inches long. I am planning to transplant them to a small container today where they will stay until they get to about 6" before going in beds (I got heavy problem with slug, plants disappear overnite - just lost 10 very healthy okra plant overnite...,this has made me an angry gardener, I squash any slug/snail I see these days... still managing to keep pesticides out of garden but my patience is growing thin... )anyways, sorry for distraction. Does eggplant seed come true to their parents ? I am still going to give it a try because these small plants look very nice and healty. I wanted to see if others have tried growing from seeds they saved.

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Comments (6)

farmerdilla
14 years ago
Like everything else, open pollinated cultivars will come true, hybrids do not. White eggplant from a farmers market you have about a 55-50 chance. From a grocery store, it will be a hybrid, but rarely do they sell white eggplant. Odds are high, even with a hybrid that you will get servicable fruit.
greenthumbsj
Original Author
14 years ago
sorry, i meant to say the eggplant that grew in the plant that I bought. This was not a farmers market eggplant but a home grown. I had about a dozen of them and one riped and then started rotting which is when I saved the seeds. I will give them a try because the plants look really healthy and my cauliflowers are beginning to grow about 5" in diameter so I will have space for about a dozen eggplants.
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Karen Pease
14 years ago
I had about a dozen of them and one riped and then started rotting which is when I saved the seeds

...huh? You save the seeds from your *best* fruit, not your worst ones, unless you want to grow bad fruit the next year.
greenthumbsj
Original Author
14 years ago
I don't think the rotting meant a bad fruit, it started rotting because it was too ripe and stayed on the plant too long. Since this was the first time I had seen an eggplant ripe, I didn't know if it was ready or not. Tomatoes were easy, they turn bright red and tell me its time to pluck :)

It was a good size fruit but and looking at the babies produced, I can tell the seeds were very good quality.
Karen Pease
14 years ago
Well, if staying ripe for a long time without rotting isn't a quality you care about breeding for...
cyrus_gardner
14 years ago
It will be just fine.
As you mentioned the rot was due to ripening, that is good.
Even If the eggplant had rotted all the way, still the seeds would have been fine. That is how it happens in the wild;
Eggplant ripens, falls off, get rotted, seeds survive and grow.Tomato and eggplant seeds are tough.

That is how I collect cucumber seeds; let one over ripe, almost rot. Then I cut it open and take the seeds out and process it.

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