The short answer is: in the heat! Eggplants love warmth, flourishing in Florida, North Carolina and other hot and swampy southern areas of the United States. Needing a minimum of at least 100 frost-free days to mature, the only way to grow Eggplant in the northern US is inside a brick oven (literally.) More on that later.

Nobody can quite determine the origin of Eggplant, though earliest references point to China or India-somewhere on the Asian continent. DNA sequencing will probably answer that question for us eventually; however, the mystery of its origins only heighten my interest in the plant. Eggplant is a cousin to tomatoes and potatoes, which though in the same family, originated in the western hemisphere, rather than the east. Botanically this is an interesting situation, as native origins of plant families generally cluster in similar areas. (Sidebar-cactus plants are mostly native to the "new world" (western hemisphere) while euphorbias are found in the "old world" (eastern hemisphere). Because the two genera have such similar appearances, they are often mistaken for one another. The similar appearances are an example of plants adapting to similar conditions on completely different continents, thus appearing similar, but not sharing the same genes.)

I remember, as a child, being fascinated by the purple flowers and bright red berries of a humongous deadly nightshade plant growing over the fence in our yard. The only thing that kept me from touching the plant was the fear of eating ANYTHIHNG that did not come from the grocery store. (A child-raising technique of 20th century America, which most likely has cost emergency rooms thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and has lowered the number of needed phone answerers at Poison Control.) Fascinating, then, is is not, that tomatoes and potatoes-beloved staples of the American diet-and eggplant, the mysterious, oft talked about, rarely seen cousin from afar, are part of this highly poisonous family. How did we start eating eggplant?

I never ate eggplant until I had my own vegetable garden to maintain (on someone else's dollar). I never thought about eggplant until I planted a "Pizza Patch" in the little children's vegetable garden at Fort Ticonderoga in New York. I learned about the idea of the pizza patch from the book "Sunflower House," by Sharon Lovejoy, and our visitors delighted in the resulting garden. I quickly had to delight in finding ways to keep bugs away from the plants,

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