Pollinating Arugula Plant: A Guide to Boosting Yield

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All three species of arugula are in the Brassicaceae family and are native to the Mediterranean region where they’ve been popular for thousands of years. In antiquity, arugula was highly regarded as an edible salad green, an oil seed and a medicinal food (for digestive issues, general health and as an aphrodisiac). In fact, the first century BCE poet Virgil said arugula “excites the sexual desire of drowsy people.”

Today, arugula is the most common and popular green in Italy, where it still grows wild and is foraged in the spring. Despite the plants popularity in the “Old World,” this peppery green did not start to gain popularity in the United States until the 1980s. Our English-speaking brethren in the United Kingdom call the plant “rocket” or “wall rocket” (due to its ability to grow on cliff faces or in the crevices of brick walls). The “rocket” part has nothing to do with space shuttles, and has everything to do with cultural sharing. In northern Italy, arugula is called “ruchetta.” When the plant was introduced to the French, they called it “roquette.” Eventually, it made its way across the English Channel to the Brits, who “anglicized” the word to its modern name “rocket” in the 1600s.

So, why do we call it “arugula” instead of “rocket” as our English-speaking brethren do in Great Britain? As it turns out, we’ve opted for a derivation of the southern Italian “aruculu,” due to the linguistic influences of our southern Italian immigrants who helped introduce the plant to the states (perhaps they were fed up with our relatively tasteless, yet popular iceberg lettuce).

Apparently, in addition to its culinary uses, arugula was used to “cure” dysentery in women by boiling the leaves in wine (according to the writings of Trotula from the 12th century). Frankly, we’d much rather eat it in salads, on pizza, as pesto, and as an herb to flavor meat, fish, mushrooms, and grain (you can use strong, spicy arugula sparingly like basil or thyme instead of as a salad green, if you like).

Human beings aren’t the only ones that like arugula. As the plants flower from May through September, it’s visited by bees and other pollinators. Arugula flowers are hermaphroditic (containing both male and female organs), and will produce seed pods full of tiny, easily harvested seeds in late summer/early fall.

Why should you eat arugula? Our ancestors were correct: modern science has started to unravel some of the mysteries of this cancer-fighting superfood. Compared ounce per ounce with iceberg lettuce, arugula packs quite a nutritional punch:

It’s also chock-full of isothiocyanates, important cancer-fighting compounds that give arugula their characteristic “spicy” flavor. Specifically, the compound scientists are most interested in arugula for is called erucin. Arugula is sweeter during the cool of spring and fall, and spicier during the hot summer months. When we eat it raw as a salad green during the summer, we’ll “cut” the heat by adding a sweet mustard-based salad dressing. As for its purported aphrodisiac effects, we’ll let you decide…

Helpful Guild Plants/Companion Plants

Definition: A plant “guild” is a polyculture plant system (multiple plant species planted together) purposefully designed to create symbiotic relationships between species, increase plant productivity and generate higher survival rates among the individual plants in the guild system. If you’ve ever visited a “wild” ecosystem (mature forest or prairie), you’ve unknowingly seen plant guilds. Like people, plants perform better in communities than they do as isolated individuals.

• alliums (garlic, onions, shallots, etc)
• beets
• bush beans
• carrots
• celery
• cucumber
• lettuce
• potatoes
• spinach
• *strawberries (*some sources say arugula and strawberries do not grow well together, others say they do. We have arugula and strawberries planted together, and both are thriving)

• dill
• mint
• rosemary
• thyme

Sun, Soil & Water

Sun:

• Spring/Summer – Arugula is a fairly versatile plant that can tolerate full sun (especially in the northern hemisphere) or part shade (especially in the southern hemisphere). In the early winter through spring, it grows best with cool-mild temperatures and full sun (6+ hours direct sunlight per day). However, in the warmer, longer days of late spring or summer, arugula can benefit from being in the shade of other plants, receiving less than 6 hours of direct sunlight per day.
• Fall/Winter – For fall/winter harvests, we recommend selecting spots where your arugula will receive (6+ hours of direct sunlight per day). Note that if you have deciduous trees that drop their fall leaves, this may include more locations than the shadier days of summer.

Soil: Arugula tolerates most soils but grows best in rich soils with lots of organic matter and a pH between 6.0 – 7.0.

Five techniques that you can use to drastically improve your soil health & biological fertility are:

• “hugelkultur” (click here to read about this technique);
• polyculture plant guilds (see “Guild Plants,” the next section in this guide);
• top-dressing your soil with 3-6 inches of wood chips/mulch twice per year in the fall and spring;
• using living cover crop mixes rather than leaving your soil fallow;
• using compost from hot composting methods (Berkeley method) or worm castings (you can buy worm castings in our store). Apply the compost/castings on top of our beds and water them in or maximize the compost/castings over a larger area by making actively aerated compost teas (AACT) to be used as soil drenches or foliar sprays. Both applications drastically increase the quantity and diversity of beneficial microbes in your soil and on your plants.

These techniques can improve your soil fertility to the point that your plants will not require any additional fertilizer and virtually no additional water throughout the growing season once their root systems get established. We recommend that you NOT use non-organic/synthetic fertilizers as these will have a compounding harmful effect on your soil over time. Plan to build your soil fertility for the long-term using techniques that build biological soil fertility.

Water: This is variable depending on the maturity of the plant and your local rainfall but arugula needs soil moisture levels to stay around the same consistency of a well-wrung kitchen sponge. This might mean watering up to 1-3 inches per week, or not irrigating at all. If your soil is healthy, your plants have established their root systems and your soil feels like a well-wrung sponge when you insert a finger up to the 2nd knuckle, you might not need to provide any additional water to your mature arugula plants (tiny seedlings always need damper soil until their roots establish).

If you do need to water, water deeply then wait until your plants show signs of needing more (shallow watering can lead to shallower root systems). As with many perennial plants, our mature “wild arugula” (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) only needs to be watered under drought conditions, as its roots grow stronger and deeper each year. However, our young annual arugula requires a bit more “babying” since they have shorter lifespans than perennials and thus have less time to develop large root systems.

Note that both perennial and annual arugula tends to develop a spicier flavor when it is stressed by drought or heat. It’s especially important to keep track of soil moisture if you prefer tender, mild arugula. Arugula that has become spicy loses some of its heat when cooked or prepared with fats like oil or butter.

How to Plant, Grow, and Harvest Organic Arugula from Seed in a Raised Bed