Why Are My Eggplant Flowers Falling Off?

Have you ever had lots of beautiful eggplant flowers, but they just dry up and fall off without producing any fruit?

I had this problem with my plants, and hand pollination made a big difference. It’s actually really simple once you know what to do.

I put together a short guide on how I hand pollinate eggplant flowers, plus a few pruning tips that can help the plants produce bigger fruit:

https://dinasgarden.com/how-to-hand-pollinate-eggplant/

Thanks for sharing this. Besides pollination, temperature seems to be the other big one: from what I've read, eggplant tends to drop flowers when nights get below roughly 15°C or days go above the low 30s. Sun hours matter too, 6-8 a day. I'm building an app that shows how many hours of direct sun a garden spot gets through the year, and afternoon shade turns out to be what people underestimate most. Did yours get full sun all day?

I had the same heartbreak with my first eggplants, lots of purple flowers and then nothing. What finally turned it around for me was a mix of steady watering and a little help with pollination. I water deeply two or three times a week instead of a light sprinkle every day, so the soil stays evenly moist about an inch down, and I mulch with about two inches of straw to keep it from drying out between waterings. In the morning, when the flowers are fresh, I gently shake each stem or tap the flower with a small paintbrush to move the pollen around. I do that every other day for a week or so when a flush of blooms opens. I also learned not to feed too much nitrogen, which gave me leaves but fewer fruit. Once I kept the plants in full sun, watered consistently, and helped them along, most of the flowers started setting fruit within a couple of weeks.