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Re: Eggplant not working

Re:

> I do however, have the same problem with my peppers not setting fruit,
> as well as my beans and cukes. The cukes form those cute little babies
> on the ends of the flowers and then shrivel and die. This is my first
> year at this, so I'm guessing, but I am suspicious that I am not
> fertilizing them properly. In fear of overdoing it, I think I have
> underdone it. We also don't have a lot of sun in the garden, so I take
> what I can get. To get the tomatoes to set fruit, I vibrate the flowers
> to self pollinate them and this seems to be working. To date, I haven't
> seen one bee in the garden to help with this.

This - the lack of bees - is probably at least some of your problem.
The baby fruits forming and then shrivelling up definitely sounds
like a lack of pollination. (Though it doesn't explain the problem
with the beans.) Cucumbers, eggplants, and peppers all have both male
and female flowers, and so they need something to carry pollen from
male to female - even shaking isn't likely to help. Tomatoes, on the
other hand, have both male and  female parts in one flower, so
shaking will help with pollination.

You can hand-pollinate by picking the male flowers and
sprinkling/brushing the pollen onto the female ones. I've heard it
said that it's better to use flowers from different plants - to use a
male flower from Eggplant Two to pollinate the flower from Eggplant
One, say. You might have to hand-pollinate to get much fruit - last
year, the only squash I got were the ones that I hand-pollinated.

It might help to plant flowers that attract bees, but on the other
hand, with so many honeybees gone,  I don't know if it would do any
good or not. (I do see a few bumblebees and some gnats buzzing around
my oregano and borage when they flower.)

Now, this doesn't explain the bean problem at all, because beans,
just like tomatoes, have everything they need in one flower. I've had
beans take a long time to flower, but I've never had them steadily
fail to produce beans from flowers, so I'm clueless about them.

Martha

M. Wilson
mart@best.com


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