Eggplant Woes

Last week I shared how very pleased I am with how my squashes are progressing this year. Now it's time to share one of the failures in the garden this summer. All of my eggplants are sick, very sick. They started off looking nice and healthy. Here they are in late June.

June 29

By late July they had grown quite a bit and were looking pretty much ok, but look way off on the left side where you can see a sickly leaf, it's brown at the end and the rest of it is yellowing and wilting. Look at that nice healthy looking plant in the foreground next to the purple basil.

July 20

Here it is yesterday. The creeping crud is moving it's way up the plant.

August 12

Here's another plant just a few days ago. It and all the rest of the eggplants have all the symptoms of Verticillium Wilt. Do a web search for Verticillium in eggplant and you'll find any number of photos showing eggplants that look like mine.

August 8

The first symptom was the wilting of leaves starting from the bottom of the plants. But not necessarily the entire leaf. The tips and/or the edges would wilt. The wilted parts would start to curl up and yellow and then turn crispy brown. Eventually the entire leaf turns brown and falls off.

August 8

As the disease progresses up the plant it kills the flowers.

August 8

The very first flowers to set have produced some decent fruits. One of the interesting things about Verticillium is that it may not attack the plants right away. It often attacks just as the plants start to flower or it may even show up later just as the plants are full of fruits. It doesn't seem to affect the fruits that set before the plants become infected.  I just harvested that eggplant on the left yesterday, it weighed about a pound and is a really nice quality eggplant. This is one of the less affected plants and has a few more fruits that have set.

August 12

You can see that all the plants are infected, there's wilting, yellowing, and crispy brown throughout the patch. There's just a few eggplants developing on the plants. I'm going to let them mature, harvest them, and then pull out the plants. These will not be going into the compost, they need to go into the garbage, be burned, or disposed of in another way to prevent spreading the fungus.

August 12

Verticillium can persist in the soil for up to 14 years without a host, so crop rotations aren't necessarily a solution. Soil solarization is one recommendation for treating the soil, but that's not very practical, I would have to take my entire garden out of production at the height of summer. There's some really nasty chemicals that conventional growers can use - also not an option for me. Actinovate is an OMRI listed fungicide that seems to have some effectiveness. I've given my plants a couple of soil drenches with it and the wilting has slowed down. I doubt that it will cure the problem though, I'm just buying some time so that I can get some sort of harvest before the plants die.

There are no know Verticillium resistant eggplant varieties available so I can't resort to that fix. One option that I may experiment with next year is grafting.  All solanaceous plants are hosts for Verticillium, but there are resistant tomato varieties. Eggplants can be grafted onto tomato rootstocks and a resistant tomato rootstock can confer resistance to the eggplant graft.

Another option for growing eggplant in the future is growing them in containers using clean potting soil each year. This is a Sicilian eggplant that I'm trying to grow in a 5-gallon container. It has it's own woeful tale. It's tiny because it has been shrinking, it's had two major hits from Odocoileus hemionus.

How Verticillium got into my garden soil is a mystery, but the stuff gets around in a number of ways. It could have come in with infected soil, on contaminated seeds, in contaminated water, it can be transmitted by insects, and can even be airborne.

And the Odocoileus hemionus problem? My fault once, the FedEx guy the other time, the gate was left open and she just walked right in and started to browse.