What’s Overwintering?

It’s the process of growing a plant as an annual instead of a perennial (meaning year after year, instead of just seasonally). Not all plants can do this, but some popular ones like eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes can. The process involves removing all of the fruit, flowers, and most of the foliage until the plant has just a few main stems. You then keep the plant alive during winter until your climate returns to an ideal temperature for the plant. Doing this lets you jump-start your next growing season since you’ll already have a mature plant ready to produce fruit. Here’s a video about when and how to overwinter.

The Results

For this garden, we overwintered 7 eggplants. We kept their roots warm during winter with regular watering from The Garden Grid™ and kept a close eye on any unexpected freezing temps (freezing temps without protection for the eggplant would kill them)

While all of the eggplants didn’t survive (watch the video above for details) the ones that did are thriving! Had we not overwintered, and decided to start fresh with new seedlings in spring, we would need to wait about 3 months from planting until they produced fruit. Instead, we started harvesting in early spring and will continue until late fall.

This is a practice we’ll keep doing in our own gardens (and hopefully you will too) for our best and most productive eggplants.