Welcome to Homegrown/Homemade, a video series from FineGardening.com. We’ll be following a gardener (Fine Gardening executive editor Danielle Sherry) and a cook (Sarah Breckenridge) as they plant, maintain, harvest, store, and prepare garden vegetables. If you’re new to vegetable gardening, you’ll find these videos very helpful. In this video, the topic is eggplant.

Episode 1: How to Plant Eggplants

Don’t let these purple or white beauties fool you: when you know how to do it, growing eggplant is simple. In this first episode, Danielle shares all the tricks and tips you need to get them off to a good start. The most important thing to know is that your eggplants will need to be staked. But how? Watch as our hosts present a few different options for making sure your plants won’t topple over with the weight of too many fruits.

Episode 2: How to Care for Eggplants

Eggplants growing slowly? Refusing to blossom? Don’t sweat it. Just watch this video to learn how to fix whatever is wrong. (Hint: hand-pollination might be in order.) Hand-pollination is quite easy. You simply take an ordinary, art-supply type paintbrush and gently sweep it across the surface of the eggplant blossoms. Then you continue repeating that same action over the rest of the blossoms present. This ensures you’ll get fruit before you know it.

Episode 3: How to Harvest Eggplants

You may do the twist when you harvest your vegetables, but that’s not how it’s done when it comes time to harvest eggplant. Learn how to properly pick your crop in episode 3. Eggplants are not like a tomato: they don’t turn from green to red, letting you know they’re ripe. With an eggplant it is more about the luster of their skin and the firmness of the fruit. Learn what dull versus shiny skin means, and other tricks to identifying ripe eggplants in this video.