Nov 6, 2014 3 min read

I don’t like eggplant. I find it both squishy and slimy. Unless you bury it in cheese and breadcrumbs and tomato sauce, it doesn’t taste like anything good. And if you’re going to make Parmesan, I think it should be called “veal.”

But last June the farmer in the house dug three holes and put in eggplant seedlings, and those three plants have given us, at last count, 1.2 million eggplants.

Not really. But since July we’ve picked enough eggplants to allow us to deliver whole baskets full to neighbors and family, over and over again. After my friend Karen grilled and ate our eggplants for a week and was probably sick of them, I found myself with a dozen more. And so one night after dark, I sneaked onto her front porch with another box of them, and then followed up with an apologetic email.

But what else was I going to do with them?

That first batch, we made eggplant Parmesan – three huge pans of it: one for us to eat and two more for the freezer. I should bring one out and thaw it for dinner, but I just can’t face it.

Eggplant isn’t our only gardening success. Our tomato crop was bodacious this year, too. We ate them until our lips were chapped from the acid, and then started fobbing them off on others, too.

But man, those eggplants. I should say these, because the plants were still at it as of this past Monday, when we picked five smallish ones. We think that was the last of them, finally.

Except for what’s known as the mutant, giant eggplant, the one we have been watching all season. The one I visit every day on my way past the garden. It freaks me out a little.

Sometime in July, the plant sent out a little blossom that landed between the wires of the garden fence. As the fruit grew, it stayed in that wire square, eventually filling the space. In September, while in the garden harvesting, I noticed a big, ripe, black blob. But as I tried to pull it from the vine, it wouldn’t budge. The eggplant had refused to leave the fence, and just kept growing there between the wires, bulbous and stubborn.

It is now stuck there, like a very fat person wearing a very skinny belt, with flesh bulging out all over.

“I think it’s going to blow,” I told the farmer as I tugged at it the other day.

“I’ll put up some orange cones and police tape,” he said.

Touching the giant eggplant, you can feel the tensile pressure building up in there. If it keeps growing – and believe me, this does not strike me as a vegetable that’s likely to throw in the towel any time soon – it will eventually explode. We’ll have slime and seeds everywhere.

“It could put someone’s eye out,” I said.

We’re going to wait for the next frost, and then either dismantle that part of the fence to free it or take a knife to the eggplant. The farmer tells me there’s no way to take it alive.

Either way, there’s enough eggplant there for three more pans of Parmesan.

Sigh.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.