CHAPTER XVI. 

 EGG PLANTS. 



ROBABLY the most profitable crop and that 

 upon which the greatest number of dollars has 

 been realized per acre, is the egg plant. The 

 prices realized at times when this fruit is scarce 

 are almost beyond belief, instances having been 

 known where they have been sold as high as 

 $20.00 per crate. It is at times one of the 

 hardest vegetables to grow and few growers 

 are uniformly successful in its production. I have often had a 

 field, in which I considered the conditions ideal for growing this 

 vegetable, and in which I had taken the greatest possible pains 

 in producing plants, entirely destroyed by some of the diseases 

 (of which we really know very little) attacking it. Sometimes 

 the entire crop was destroyed at once, and occasionally by degrees, 

 first one plant wilting and then another until finally the entire 

 patch was destroyed, producing very little or no fruit at all, and 

 such as was produced being of an inferior size and quality. 



Egg plant is probably grown with greatest success upon fields 

 either entirely new or that have been preceded by one of the 

 leguminous crops the previous summer, such as cowpeas, velvet 

 beans or beggar-weed. I consider that the ideal conditions exist 

 where a heavy crop of velvet beans has been grown the previous 

 summer. The seed-bed should be prepared in early August, being 

 careful to give the plants plenty of room in their early develop- 

 ment ; in fact, a spindly or leggy plant had better not be planted 

 at all. The great value of the crop makes it such that great care 

 should be taken to produce only from the very best selected seed 

 and under the most propitious conditions. It is essential for this 

 reason to place the seed-bed upon similar new soil so that there 

 is no possibility of infection of diseases such as root knot (nema- 



