Sow seeds in moistened seed starting mix, just quarter of an inch deep, and keep soil evenly moist but not waterlogged. If you’re going to grow your own from seed, you’ll need to start them indoors eight to 10 weeks before the average last frost date in spring for your area. Seed to harvest usually takes between 100 and 120 days, so timing is key. While the fruit of this plant takes many different forms, each cultivar or hybrid comes from the same species, S. Thankfully the people of Toledo were right about eggplant, yes? Who else feels bad that Gerard missed out on this delectable treat? He finishes his treatise on eggplants with this word of advice: “It is therefore better to esteem this plant and have it in the garden for your pleasure and the rarenesse thereof, than for any vertue or good qualities yet knowne.”

This, despite acknowledging that “The people of Toledo eat them with great devotion.” This is perhaps why Gerard called eggplant the “Madde Apple,” and why he writes, “doubtlesse these Apples have a mischievous qualitie, the use whereof is utterly to bee forsaken.” You can see where the plant got its name! The reference to the “great Nightshade” is telling, because some people believed that eggplant was poisonous like Atropa belladonna, or “deadly nightshade,” another member of the same plant family. “Raging Apples hath a round stalke of two foot high, divided into sundry branches….the floures of a white colour, and sometimes changing into purple, made of six parts wide open like a star… which being past, the fruit comes in place, set in a cornered cup or huske after the manner of great Nightshade, great and somewhat long, of the bignesse of a Swans egge.” In his 1597 book, Gerard’s Herball, the English herbalist Thomas Gerard listed it as the “Madde Apple,” and wrote this in his description: Over time, the fruit made its way to Europe, appearing in various writings and illustrations of the Medieval era and before. In “History and Iconography of Eggplant,” an article written for Chronica Horticulturae, the journal of the International Society for Horticultural Science, Marie-Christine Daunay and Jules Janick explain that “Eggplant was domesticated from wild forms in the Indo-Burma region with indications that it was cultivated in antiquity.”ĭaunay, a French scientist who specializes in vegetables in the Solanaceae family and eggplant in particular, and Janick, a professor of horticulture at Indiana’s Purdue University, also write that eggplant is probably native to a wide region encompassing India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China, and can be found growing wild in all these places. People have appreciated the versatile nature of eggplant for thousands of years.

Eggplant seedlings