A Beginning and an End

From the gardener’s perspective, flowers represent the beginning or the end of an annual’s useful life. Spring and summer annuals are generally planted for their fruiting bodies – think tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and squash, while fall and winter vegetables are typically grown for their leaves and immature flowers – think cabbage, mustards and broccoli. Thus tomato flowers are a beginning, the promise of tomatoes, while cabbage flowers represent an ending, the promise only of seeds. A cabbage or mustard plant in flower is rangy and generally unpalatable, except perhaps to aphids. There’s even a term for flowering in fall and winter vegetables: bolting.  The term is usually uttered with a bitterness matched only by the leaves themselves.  The plant, of course, doesn’t care at all about our desires (although I suppose Pollan would disagree).  For the cabbage, flowering is a win, a chance to bear offspring.

Can you guess the fruit that will become of the rather lovely flower below?  Hint (barely):  I don’t like it at all – it’s one of the vegetables that I grow to share with neighbors, family, or Plant-A-Row.

Eggplant Flower

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