Zuby,

Eggplants are related to tomatoes, potatoes and peppers, among other things, and are affected by the same diseases, which means there are quite a few possibilities. It could be a disease that is viral, bacterial or fungal in nature. To narrow it down, we need to know more.

When it first appears, does it start on the fruit or on the leaves first? Or, does it appear on both the foliage and the fruit at the same time. I am assuming the leaves are also infected?

If the leaves are affected, can you either describe what they look like or post a photo of them? Often, with a photo of the leaves, we can narrow down whether it is something like Alternaria canker, bacterial spot, bacterial speck or Early Blight by the appearance of the leaves or stems. Also, since certain diseases appear only in cooler weather versus hotter weather, if you can remember about what month you first notice the spots that could help.

Is this a cosmetic issue that only affects the appearance of the eggplant fruit, or does it make them inedible?

I think we probably can figure it out, but we need more photos or descriptions. Lots of the issues that affect plants in the solanum family greatly resemble each other visually. Knowing when the issue appears, how it progresses, what it looks like on the plants, etc. should help us narrow it down.

Dawn

The plants don't have the same type of spots. They are infested with flea beetles and a caterpillar (I see droppings in this pic). Some leaves have turned brown, but I thought that was from the insects. This pic shows a brown patch, but I had to look for this example. As I mentioned, we planted early and since spring was cold and wet, these guys did not thrive. I tried garlic spray for the beetles; didn't help much.

The spots on the fruit are woody feeling. It peels off, and the fruit is edible, but not great. Very few fruits: 4 from this Ghostbuster and one very small Pintung Long. My 3 other plants (all different varieties) have flowered, but not produced.

I have several tomato and pepper plants, all fine. I rotate locations each year, although I don't have the space to rotate whole families, so the eggplant are where the tomatoes were last year. Two years ago I had awesome eggplants!

As far as when it appears, they appear immediately when the fruit is very small. The plants have looked so bad from the get-go, hard to say when the leaves turned.

I hope that answers all your questions. Thank you for your help!
Amy

Here is the close up of the leaf with the spot. I couldn't figure out how to attach both pics to the previous message.
Amy

I'm just speculating here, but based upon the photos and how infested your plants are from flea beetles, I think that the fruit is being scarred by the beetles when it is small. As the fruit grows the size of the scar is magnified.

It would not surprise me that if you are able to kill back the flea beetles the fruit would then look normal, and the plant would be more productive.

Good luck.

I tend to agree with Scott. The signs on the leaves looks more like something nippling on them rather than a disease to me. I only planted two plants and so far they have done very well. PIcking one tonight. Jay

Amy,

Thanks for posting the photos. They helped me rule out most all the things I thought it might be.....because your plants do not show any sign of Early Blight, Bacterial Speck, Bacterial Spot or Bacterial Canker. The leaves also do not show any of the yellowing or the darker spots with yellow halos we often see with fungal infections. Your plants' stems also look really healthy. So, even though all the above doesn't tell you what your plants do have, we've ruled out several of the more serious possibilities.

The fruit also does not show signs of anthracnose, which is one of the more serious issues that eggplant can face, so that's a good sign too.

Those are some of the worst flea-beetle-eaten-leaves I've ever seen. I don't normally have many flea beetles here, just occasionally very early in the season. So, I'm agreeing with Scott on this one. In the absence of any other symptoms, and with that much flea beetle damage on the foliage, I think they also damaged your plants' fruit.

If you still have flea beetles on your plants at mid-summer, you need to do something to keep them off the plants. That 'something' is up to you and the things you can do depend on whether you're gardening organically or not.

If you are gardening as organically as possible you have several options. The one I'd likely choose would be to spray the plants with Spinosad (an organic pesticide) to kill the existing flea beetles. Then I'd put hoops over the area where they are growing and suspend a summerweight floating row cover over the plants. I'd use wooden 2 x 4s or green fence poles, rocks, bricks, rebar, etc. (whatever was handy) to hold the fabric down firmly against the ground so the flea beetles cannot go underneath it to get to the plants. The row cover excludes the beetles from the plants. In many parts of the USA, it is very hard to fight the flea beetles on eggplant without the use of row covers or heavy-duty synthetic pesticides. Luckily, eggplant flowers are perfect (each flower contains both male and female reproductive parts) so they self-pollinate. Thus, you won't have to constantly uncover your eggplant in order to hand-pollinate them and then put the row cover back over them. However, as with many other self-pollinated and self-fertilized veggies, they often benefit from a little bee activity or good wind to shake or vibrate the flowers a bit to cause the pollen to move around within the flowers. However, you could give each plant a little shake, shove or push daily, or thump the individual flowers right through the row cover if it isn't pulled too tight, to do the same thing.

You could forgo floating row cover (I love the stuff and cannot imagine gardening without it), and dust food-grade (not the swimming filter type) Diatomaceous Earth on the plants often. Flea beetles tend to avoid plants dusted with DE. Or, you could get a similar effect by spraying the plants with Surround WP, a kaolin clay product that coats the plants with a thin film that discourages certain insects.

The best ways to prevent flea beetle damage next year are:

(1) move the plants to an area as far away as reasonably possible from the areas where you've grow eggplant the last two years. This will get the 2014 plants in a new area where (hopefully) flea beetles are not overwintering in the soil; and

2) grow them under row covers from the first day you put them in the ground.

Other ways to help the eggplants include:

(a) raising them to a somewhat larger size before you put them in the ground. The smaller the plant, the more the flea beetles tend to harm it, so starting out with larger plants helps them withstand the damage.

(b) planting later, not earlier. I normally only see flea beetles very early in the season, like in March and April, and rarely after that. They flock to very early plantings like radishes or mustard greens in some years, but later plantings are almost untouched. If you still are seeing flea beetles in the kind of hot weather we're having, I'm really surprised. I don't think I've seen any flea beetle damage here since the first week of May. I'm further south than a lot of y'all though, since I'm so far south that I have Texas to my west, south, and east. In my garden, when flea beetles are even a pest at all, it is only very early in the season.

(c) Plant radishes someplace, but as far away from the eggplants as you reasonably can. Use them as trap plants to draw the flea beetles away from the eggplants to them. Then, when you see the flea beetles on them, use the insecticide of your choice to kill the beetles there before they can move to other plants. Other cool-season plants that attract flea beetles include Southern Giant mustard greens, and most forms of kale. I grow mustard and kale all winter. If you are in northern OK, they likely would survive most winters for you, but if they don't, you still can plant them in late winter or early spring to get them in the ground earlier than eggplant. When you use any plant as a trap crop to lure pests away from whatever crop you want to protect, you can either spray those plants (and only those plants) with a pesticide you'd never use on plants you intend to eat or you can wait until the plants are heavily infested and just pull them up. In the case of flea beetles, since they seem to be more of an ongoing problem, I'd use the spraying of the trap crop, not yanking it and removing it.

(d) Use sticky yellow traps to attract and catch the flea beetles. You can buy them from organic suppliers, or you can make your own. You can use a substance like Tree Tanglefoot placed on yellow plastic bottles, yellow poster board, scrap lumber painted yellow or even yellow solo cups, or you can get about the same effect from using vaseline. The flea beetles are attracted to the yellow color and get caught in the Tree Tanglefoot, the adhesive of commercially-available yellow sticky traps, or the vaseline. Wash off the vaseline occasionally, or just toss the yellow item into the trash and replace it with a new one.

(e) Use one of the organic pest repellent sprays to see if you can repel them from your plants. Two repellent sprays I like are Hot Pepper Wax and Garlic Barrier. I can buy them at local nurseries (if you consider the D-FW metroplex, 70-80 miles south of me to be local) but I don't know where they are available in Oklahoma. Any nursery or garden center that carries a good selection of organic products should have one or the other. I've bought Garlic Barrier in Tractor Supply Company stores before, both in TX and OK. Both also are available online.

Because flea beetles can attack many kinds of plants, it is important to try to destroy them while they are overwintering. You could do this by putting clear or black plastic over the planting beds in the off-season so the sun can (hopefully) solarize it and the heat will kill them. This works great in summer, but of course you are using those beds in summer. It will work in some winters too if there's enough bright sunny days.

Another option is to buy a couple of large pots and a good soil-less mix in springtime and raise the eggplants in the pots every second or third year just so you can rotate the plants as far away as possible for any soil possibly infested with them. You still would have to use all the other methods to keep the flea beetles off your plants after they emerge from the garden soil, but at least you'd know the plants are in pots that have clean soil with no overwintering flea beetles in it.

You also can use plastic as a mulch in your planting rows, or use a commercial weedblock fabric. Cut a big X in the plastic or fabric where you want to put a plant. Be sure to put mulch on top of the plastic or fabric before the weather gets too hot so that the plant roots won't cook. This won't prevent them from emerging from the soil, but it will slow them down as they'll have to activity search for a way to get out from under the fabric after they emerge.

Unfortunately, flea beetles sometimes feed on plant roots, so plastic or landscape fabric that trapped them in the soil might encourage that sort of damage. (Sometimes, there are no perfect solutions.)

When I have a persistent pest problem, I will rototill the soil several times in winter---especially when it is really cold---in order to uncover the overwintering pests in the hope that they will freeze to death. Even if the exposed pests don't freeze to death, once the soil has been turned over and they are exposed, then predator bugs, birds, etc. may eat them for you.

If you want to use a synthetic pesticide like Sevin to kill them, which certainly is your right, please try to use it on the plants when bees are not active because we need our bees for pollination.

With most pests, you have years when they are really bad, and years when they aren't so bad. Unfortunately, once you have an established flea beetle population on your property, it seems like they are bad virtually every year and you have to fight hard to get rid of them and to keep them away. However, until this year, I would have said that same thing about cucumber beetles. Normally I have them all over the place about 9 or 10 months out of the year, and in December-February when I'm not seeing them, who even cares that they aren't there because you're not growing anything they would hurt at that time of the year. So, this year I wanted to make lots of pickles and I planted tons of cucumbers and mentally prepared myself to engage in a constant battle with the cucumber beetles. So, what happened? I think I saw one cucumber beetle on two separate days back in mid-Spring and haven't seen a single one since then. It makes no sense, but sometimes odd things like that do happen. Maybe you'll get lucky next year and have a flea-beetle-free year just like I somehow got lucky this year and had a cucumber-beetle-free year.

Of all the things I mentioned, I think that floating row cover might be the one that the fewest people know about and use, so I'm going to link some. I have it in 4 different weights now, from a light summerweight one to the heaviest-duty winter-weight one available and it has changed my gardening life more than anything else. We make our own hoops, sometimes from PVC pipe (using rebar hammered into the ground to anchor it, sliding each end of the PVC over the rebar) and sometimes from electrical conduit (which requires a pipe bender). You also can use very heavy gauge wire, or you can purchase wire hoops.

Good luck and please keep us posted on your battle with the flea beetles.

It can seem like a tremendous amount of work to fight a pest like flea beetles, but for a gardener or famer, it is just a part of the process. One thing to remember is that pests are not easily discouraged, whether we're talking about flea beetles, spider mites, grasshoppers, cottontail rabbits, groundhogs or deer. They can work on getting to your crops virtually 24/7 because they need to feed on the crops to survive. You, on the other hand, have a life that cannot focus on those pests 365/24/7, so you have to be vigilant and determined to fight them with every weapon in your arsenal.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Example of Summerweight Floating Row Cover

Wow! Thank you, Dawn, and everyone for the extensive information! I definitely will be taking the organic approach and will let you guys know if I get rid of them in time to have some eggplant this year. Then, next year, row covers for sure! (We've talked about that before, but need to actually do it!)
Amy