Well I told you right at the start you wouldn’t be getting Instagrammable perfection here: failures happen to every single gardener, however experienced, every year - and plenty of them. So it’s silly to pretend everything is wonderful all the time: it isn’t. Kind of like life, really.
Anyway, so my attempts at growing aubergines have been an abject disaster this year. This happens often: it’s one of the crops I struggle with, alongside Florence fennel and cauliflowers.
My total failure to raise so much as a seedling – I tried, several times, and not one of them made it – is made all the more galling by the fact that so many of my gardening friends seem to manage this feat perfectly well, and indeed with aplomb: not only have they persuaded their seedlings to germinate, they’ve grown them on into robustly healthy plants which have now produced a crop so enormous they can’t eat it all.
I am clearly going wrong somewhere. I have picked the brains of said aubergine-mastering friends and they seem to follow much the same routine as me: in fact they seem to find it pretty easy (that look creeps into their eyes betraying their astonishment that I’m finding such a simple thing so difficult – you know the one). I’m stumped. Any top tips out there?
I refuse to cheat and buy plug plants every year, even though I know from years when I have weakened that it’s a lot easier and you’re more likely to actually get an aubergine to pick. You can buy plugs which are organic, and peat-free these days, but even so it’s just so much more sustainable to sow from seed.
So I will persevere, mainly because I really, really like aubergines. But in the meantime, gardening friends being the generous souls they are (is there any group of people more willing to give you stuff than gardeners I wonder?) – I have willingly and with enthusiasm taken on their surplus aubergines to turn into quite my favourite aubergine pasta sauce.
This recipe has a particular resonance for me as it comes from Catania in Sicily and brings back sunny memories of my mother’s apartment just down the coast, where you could stand on the beach and look up the coastline at Mount Etna brooding on the horizon. If you went down after dark chances were you’d also see sparks and flames spitting out of the top like a never-ending fireworks display. Remarkable how an actively erupting volcano can come to be accepted as a normal part of daily life. The apartment also had a balcony outside from where you could look down over quite the biggest lemon tree I have ever seen, laden with golden fruits almost all year round.
Anyway, before I get too carried away, here’s the recipe. Enjoy!
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