I love eggplants. Can I grow them indoors in the winter?

August 19, 2013 6:04 PM

Eggplant is my favorite vegetable, and while you can get them year-round, the prime eggplant season is rapidly coming to a close. It is possible to make some rig in my decent-sized apartment to grow them in the winter?

I should note that winter where I live comes around October and sticks around until June or so. I do have a good southern exposure and it's very sunny where I live. I have cats, so I'm not sure if something that involves growing plants on the ground is very feasible.

Thanks!

posted by Fister Roboto to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

you'd have to play with light to get them to set fruit. Might also need to have the room warmer than you normally would.

Plants usually need a certain number of hours of daylight to trigger them to bloom and to set fruit.
posted by JPD at 6:19 PM on August 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

do you want fruit setting year round, or a quick start on fruiting once things warm up ? I've had odd success keeping peppers (same family) alive through the winter, such that when I put them out, they fruited rapidly. But didn't fruit indoors (wouldn't flower).

If you can get them to flower indoors, would they self-pollinate or not ?
posted by k5.user at 6:28 PM on August 19, 2013

Response by poster: I think ideally they'd fruit all year. I read something online where you can brush the flowers with a paintbrush to simulate the wind.
posted by Fister Roboto at 6:39 PM on August 19, 2013

I think the answer is that yes, you could do this, but it would definitely be more expensive than just buying them at the store, no matter how much they cost. The key issues are going to be photoperiod (the number of hours of light per day), light intensity, and temperature, probably in that order, which is a fancy way of repeating what JPD said. Once you get the kinks worked out you can start to worry about disease, pests and plant nutrition.

The light from your south-facing windows will need to supplemented, and you'll probably need to extend "daylight" for up to 8 extra hours per day, for a total of 12 to 14. Household light fixtures aren't going to cut it--you will at least need a bank of fluorescent bulbs (this is a video by a guy who did it with a fixture intended for an aquarium), and you may probably need to consider high-intensity discharge bulbs if you have more than a few plants. I have to stress that even what most reasonable people consider bright indoor illumination is nowhere near as bright as sunlight, and isn't even close to what most plants require when setting and ripening fruit. On top of this, your eggplant room will need to be north of 70° F, and maybe closer to 80° F. If this is starting to sound like a grow room, well, that's essentially what you need, and you'll probably have good luck looking at sources catering to hydroponics hobbyists and folks growing "tomatoes" in the basement. If you're near Chicago/Milwaukee/Madison, stop by Brew & Grow.
posted by pullayup at 7:03 PM on August 19, 2013

Response by poster: Haha. Maybe I could diversify my growing to supplement the cost of the eggplant?
posted by Fister Roboto at 7:06 PM on August 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you do decide to give it a shot, they do have baby eggplant varieties. If it were me, I would try it for one year (babies) with the cheapest available grow-light setup as described above and see if you get anywhere.
posted by skbw at 5:23 AM on August 20, 2013

An alternative approach that will be a whole lot cheaper and will result in much more eggplant is to preserve a bunch now for future use. At my house, we grill many many pounds of eggplant in the late summer and savor it all winter long. You can either cut it into rounds, grill it, and freeze it between parchment, or grill it whole, scoop out the flesh into freezer bags, and use the flesh for wintertime baba ganoush. We also freeze big batches of eggplant-containing dishes (like ratatouille) when things are in season.
posted by juliapangolin at 7:58 AM on August 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

If you have any yard space at all a likely more viable solution would be to build a hot frame. A hot frame is just a cold frame with an active means of heating the soil. I am currently building one, and am using half of a French door for the lid. The problems of developing, implementing, and maintaining a viable indoor growing environment for sun loving plants such as eggplant is going to be rough, and probably expensive. The southern exposure will help, but I fear that it just won't be enough. Supplementation with artificial light would help, (and the buy-in for a basic setup is as little as a $10 shop light from Home Depot) but reproducing the light spectrum you get outside inside is harder than you might think, and more expensive to boot. I start my tomato and eggplant seedlings in my workshop under a cheap shop light, and that does a good job, until a point. But as soon as I take them outside into real daylight they seem to grow inches overnight.

Another issue is that the green parts of the eggplant are considered dangerous to cats. I did just a little searching and came up with this.

Right, so barring a cold or hot frame in your yard, how could you pull this off indoors, and keep your cats and the eggplant safe? Well, if you own the apartment/building then I would consider replacing one of your southern exposure windows with one of the garden windows that are available. They look like a bay window, in that they project to the outside, beyond the outer building wall. That would give you the most sunlight exposure possible, short of being outside. You would also be able to close off the window to the apartment to keep cats away. If building out isn't an option, you could fabricate a frame that would box the window from the inside. You wouldn't even have to attach it to the window, just be able to set the window box so cats couldn't get to the plant. I'm thinking something along the lines of a display window at the front of a shop. But this had better be a large window, because you're going to run up against plant size and yield issues real quick. In our garden I have two black beauty variety eggplant plants. Each plant is utilizing approximately a 1x2 ft area. Each plant is over 5 foot tall, and they are getting full sun for over 10 hours (this is N. NJ, zone 6a). I transferred them from my workshop the 3rd week of May, and just this week I'll begin harvesting. My plants are doing great, but I still don't think I'll harvest more than enough to make more than 4 or 5 eggplant parm platters. Never mind my dreams of making baba and what not...

So, like I said, the easiest way to pull this off is a hot frame, which you can make from damn near anything. And even with that setup you might be hard pressed to produce enough eggplant to make it worth the effort. But for my sestertii sometimes the effort is enough by itself. Good luck, and please feel free to message me if you need some info on cold or hot frames.
posted by chosemerveilleux at 8:52 PM on August 20, 2013

no- a hot frame wouldn't work. hours of sunlight matter.
posted by JPD at 1:37 PM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]