Aubergine post mortem

Disappointed by aubergines this year. Had some Black Beauty seeds. Propogated fine. Ended up growing several quite huge plants, no shortage of flowers, but no fruit whatsoever. Time for the post mortem.

I had a browse through this forum for previous posts on this subject, and I get the impression that they are not the easiest things to get right. I am a newbie to growing stuff, so interested in feedback. Trying to be methodical, I have identified several possible problems:

1) Starting too late? I started them off in late March/early April.

2) Climate control? I left them in pots outdoors - no greenhouse.

3) Wrong soil? I used multipurpose compost from B&Q.

4) Manual pollination required? I left it up to the bees.

5) Insufficient feeding? I used tomato feed on them, but may have been remiss.

6) Just a bad year? We had a pretty attrocious summer (the tomatoes really suffered, and there seemed to be a shortage of locally grown veg in the shops).

Don't know if I have missed any factors - but I feel that I cannot have been far adrift given that the plants themselves seemed to thrive, if not fruiting.

 

I did pretty well what you did and had little success apart from one plant that I stuck in with a pepper and a chilli direct into a bag of compost. This produced a lot of flowers and fruit, though none very big (5 - 6 inches).

 

Hi folks I planted peppers in growbags in the greenhouse. Only got a few small fruits and the leaves were badly eaten by something! Not too sure what though. No slug trails.

 

I know by sure that snails like pepper leaves

 

Hi folks thanks for the feedback.

Oddly enough we had a huge bumper crop of chilli peppers. A slightly lesser crop of capsicums, but respectable. I didn't treat them any differently from the aubergines.

 

I tried aubergines this year as well, as I was given a couple of plants - similar story, although mine didn't even grow very big, got a few flowers but no fruits. I had them in half grow-bags in a mini-greenhouse but everything got too big so I had to leave the door open all the time! I didn't feed mine and probably didn't water enough either really, although it sounds like that wouldn't have made a difference... all of which is no help practically but hopefully some comfort!