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ABSTRACT
The garden egg, also called African eggplant, is a type of vegetable native to Africa. The garden egg is very rich in vitamins and they cab be eaten raw, but also boiled or fried as an ingredient in vegetable stews, soups and sauces, and with boiled potatoes or plantains. This research aims to investigate the storage potential, phytochemical and microbial contents of garden egg fruit. Fresh eggplants were gotten from the market, stored for 30 days at ambient temperature. Quantitative phytochemical analysis was carried out using UV spectrophotometer to check for the absorbance of the constituents which included flavonoid, protein and ascorbic acid for a period of 30 days at fifteen days interval. Also Microbial analysis was done using serial dilution to check for fungi spores. It was noticed that as the storage days increased, the phytochemical constituents reduced making the result gotten on day zero (0) to be higher than that of day thirty (30). Fungal growth was not observed after 24 hours in the media but there was rapid growth from 48 hours. It was observed that as the serial dilution increased there was a decrease in the number of spores formed. The highest fungal count value of 92.33 ±8.84 was observed in media 101 and the lowest count value of 59.67 ±1.33 in media 103 . This study has shown that Garden egg fruits can be stored for a long time at ambient temperature and it is advisable to eat the fruit while it is still fresh to retain its nutrients.
