Arugula is one of those ur-foodie items of produce. The writer David Camp harmoniously replaced the word "America" with it in the title of his book on the rise of the nation's recent discovery of culinary taste. It is the antithesis of the green leafy champion of American culinary mediocrity: iceberg lettuce.
I feel a certain pretentiousness in saying to people, "we're growing arugula" as a result. But my wife loves the stuff, and it started early enough for our succession planting plan. We sowed it directly into the bed and it sprouted right around the beginning of spring. It was ready to eat when it was still too chilly to eat outside yet. It didn't live to see the end of May, though. After it started to bolt in the warmer weather, I had to spit out a taste-test leaf because it was so revoltingly bitter. Guess I solved that mystery of its mildness earlier in the season. Fennel seeds have now taken its place.
We definitely planted too many seeds and should have culled some small plants. Mac did his part by digging up the bed a bit and offing a few early on. The arugula turned out to be small and didn't yield as much as I expected. What we did harvest was tasty through the mid-spring. But it was constantly competing for my attention with the lettuce variety pack planted directly behind, which went completely bonkers and is still producing all kinds of tasty greens. The yield for the arugula seems so skimpy compared to this lettuce, which, for all of my inexperienced worry about the small plants, really is ten times more than we can keep up with.
I'd do arugula again, but I would not allot it much more space than it got this season, and certainly not at the expense of the lettuce.
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