Salting eggplant Was: Eggplant Parmigiana

G'day Pandora,

Mate of mine has a grafted eggplant in his yard. It's a purple type and not bitter at all. I'm not sure what it's grafted onto (I think it's probably the same Solanaceous weed often used for grafting tomatoes around here to resist root diseases*) but the expectation is that the plant will be quite long lived. It has an excellent crop ripening on it now (mid summer here) and had a previous good crop back in September (our spring). I can't say if it had a crop before that too, but it's certainly looking very healthy at the moment! :-)

*Addendum: Especially bacterial wilt. Some formal research has been done on but there seems to be some confusion over the name of the stock! The author of that article refers to it as "devil's fig (Solanum torvum)" but most of the world says giant devil's fig is Solanum hispidum and they refer to S. torvum as Turkey berry. But here in Oz, "turkey berry" is not used as a common name at all. Sigh...

Anyway, here's a good photo of the plant I *buttume* is the rootstock This is clearly what as kids we called "Derrin's curse" here in the deep north of the deep south; but that name is not recognised by mankind at large. :-) We were aware of the alternative "devil's fig", but not that official "giant devil's fig" -- which leaves open the question of what happened to simple "devil's fig" in the minds of the taxonomic pundits?

Cheers, Phred.

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