QUESTION: My eggplant is producing flowers, but then they just fall off. Why is my eggplant not fruiting? -Hannah S
ANSWER: If your eggplant produces flowers, but the blooms fall off before they can develop into fruit, there are two main reasons why this could be happening. Your eggplant may be dehydrated from lack of water, or the blossoms may not have been pollinated. Here are our tips on how to prevent this from happening.
Any time an eggplant is stressed, the flowers may drop from the plant. But, the most common reason for stress in eggplants is lack of sufficient water. Make sure your eggplants receive at least two inches of water per week. They’ll need more than that when the weather is particularly hot.
Eggplant blooms are pollinated by the wind. These plants don’t depend on pollinating insects like bees to get the job done. Keep in mind, pollination may not be occurring if the weather is exceptionally wet, humid, or hot. In humid weather, the moisture in the air makes blossoms sticky, so the pollen is unable to fall down the pistil to pollinate the flower. In extremely hot weather, the pollen will become inactive as a response to the stress of the heat—the plant doesn’t believe it will be able to survive the heat and also produce fruit. You can take matters into your own hands in these circumstances to pollinate the eggplant flowers yourself using a paintbrush. Make sure that the paintbrush you use is clean, and simply move the brush around the inside of each flower.
Garden shop advised that spraying eggplant with npk dissolved in water will prevent flowers from falling
I’m pollinating my aubergines and watering, but still not getting fruti to set. Any more ideas?
Pls forgive me for this belated response but I only saw your query today. You know these days we are sold many many things that are absolute ‘duds’. We may buy ripe coconuts and avocados & when we take them home and crack/ cut them open we find they are rotten inside. We may buy composts & soils that don’t specify ingredients or pH etc and they fail to deliver what the packages claim to be able to deliver. We may have even bought seeds/ seedlings of eggplants – plants that are intrinsically sterile: plants that grow, bloom but fail to fruit. How can we nowadays trust what we buy? Who is checking and assuring the quality of a variety of( gardening & other?) products we buy?