The Season's First Arugula and Radishes

Our radishes have been coming along really well over the last few weeks, and last week was the first time we were able to pick a few radishes. The picture above shows some lovely Easter Egg radishes and a French Breakfast radish. We used them in an arugula salad with our first big batch of arugula straight from the garden.

Jennifer and I have never grown arugula, but it truly is very easy to grow. The arugula in our lettuce pot grew small like the baby arugula you can sometimes buy in salad mixes from the grocery store, but the arugula sown directly in the garden grew large leaves; I cut a bit of both for our salad, and I found there really wasn't much of a difference in texture and taste between the larger and smaller arugula leaves.

Upon mentioning to people that Jennifer and I have been growing arugula this season, we've received a lot of questions about what arugula is. I'm quickly realizing that although we're quite familiar with it, there are many who don't know about it, so it's only fitting that in our first post about harvesting arugula from the garden, we discuss some of the history of arugula and what exactly it is.

Here in Canada, we know this Italian salad green as arugula, but to those in the UK you might know it as rocket. It's flavour is slightly peppery and strong, it makes an excellent salad green when mixed with other types of salad greens due to its strong flavour, but I also like it on its own.

I've referred to arugula as an Italian salad green, but what I should really say is that it's a Mediterranean green, considering it's also native to places like Morocco, Portugal, and Turkey. I've read that in these regions it consistently gets used as a sauteed green as well, although in North America we're more familiar with using it as a salad green or fresh on sandwiches.

I actually found that I've enjoyed growing the arugula, and I think it's much nicer than having to buy it at the store, as the arugula we've grown seems to have more flavour. It has a much more pronounced peppery flavour. Plus, we also get to cut the arugula a few times a week at its peak.

Megan