White Egg eggplant seeds (Solanum melongena)

Solanum melongena “White Egg”

White Egg eggplant, egg eggplant, white oval eggplant: it alone explains why English speakers call the eggplant an eggplant — its oval white fruits look remarkably like chicken eggs. An old variety that has become rare, it offers smooth flesh and a mild flavor, significantly less bitter than black eggplants.

Characteristics:

• Egg shape and color: small, pure-white oval fruits, highly decorative on the plant.
• Smooth flesh: mild and barely bitter, with no need for salting to draw out excess moisture.
• Rare variety: almost disappeared from seed catalogs, it deserves to be brought back into cultivation.
• Suitable for growing in pots: perfectly adapted to patios and balconies.

Precautions:

• Like all nightshades, its foliage and unripe fruits contain solanine and must not be eaten. Only well-formed fruits are edible, and they must always be cooked.
• Frost-tender and sensitive to cold: it suffers as soon as nighttime temperatures fall below 12 °C.

Sowing advice:

• Exposure: warm, sunny, and sheltered.
• Soil: rich in humus, moist, deep, and well drained. This is an extremely hungry plant: a generous application of mature compost is crucial for fruit production.
• Method: sow in spring, from February onward indoors, at 24-26 °C — a critical point, as eggplant germinates poorly below 20 °C and is much more demanding than tomatoes. See how to sow your seeds.

Planting advice:

• Transplant after the frosts into a sunny, warm location, spacing plants 60 cm apart and providing a stake.

Care advice:

• Keep the soil moist but well drained, watering at the base without wetting the foliage. Mulch generously.
• In our climates, limit the plant to 5 or 6 fruits by pinching out the stem above the last one.

Harvesting advice:

• Harvest when the skin is taut and shiny. As soon as it turns yellow or becomes dull, the fruit is overripe: its flesh becomes bitter and full of hard seeds.

Beneficial companion plants:

• It benefits from growing near beans, which fix the nitrogen it needs in abundance, and marigolds, which help limit nematodes. Avoid growing it after tomatoes or potatoes. Also see the Rotonda Bianca eggplant and companion planting in the vegetable garden.

Benefits for biodiversity:

• Its purple flowers require buzz pollination: only bumblebees, which can vibrate their muscles at high frequency, are capable of it. Welcoming them directly improves your harvest.
• Bringing an almost extinct variety like this one back into cultivation is a concrete way to help preserve cultivated diversity.

Uses:

• Roasted or stuffed — its size makes perfect individual portions — grilled, made into caviar, or used in curry. Always cooked, never raw.

Harvesting your own seeds:
Leave one fruit well past the eating stage, until it turns yellow and wrinkles. Then remove the seeds, rinse them, and dry them. Since eggplant is predominantly self-pollinating, cross-pollination remains limited. See how to save your seeds.

Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for all living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Auvergne Volcanoes, we choose open-pollinated, non-hybrid varieties, test them for germination rates, and carefully sort and package them without any chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.

The eggplant that gave the vegetable its English name, nearly lost and in need of saving.