What is going on, everyone? This is a week-long experiment posting my gardening podcast here on dsound to see how a decentralized podcast system works - I'm happy to be here! I decided to pay to get them transcribed too, for those of you who prefer words to audio :)

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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Kevin. This is the Epic Gardening Show. Today we're gonna talk about arugula and specifically we're gonna talk about types of arugula and which ones you can grow in a warm climate and which ones that you may want to try growing in a colder climate

This question comes from Isaac who's wondering:

I live in a warmer climate and my arugula bolts relatively quickly. I want to know if there's anything out there that I can grow that's a little bit more heat tolerant.

Types of Arugula

Now, to get into this we have to talk about the botanical classifications, I guess you could say, and so arugula, the stuff that you know and call arugula, is Eruca sativa. Edible, annual plant. It's also known by rocket salad, rucula, rucoli, rugula, roquette.

There are a lot of different names for it, but the general name is arugula. But here's the thing, a lot of people confuse it or mix it up with Diplotaxis tenuifolia, which is wild rocket arugula. That's the common name for that one. That's another plant in the brassica family and it's also used very similar to normal arugula, but it is a different plant, and so that is the key with arugula.

You have Eruca sativa, common arugula or commonly cultivated arugula, and then you have Diplotaxis tenuifolia, which is the wild arugula.

Wild Arugula

Now, here's the interesting thing: normal arugula is an annual. Wild arugula is a perennial, so wild arugula is very good at self-seeding, and so if you want to dedicate an area of your garden to wild arugula, then you can let some of them bolt and they're gonna self-seed very easily, let me tell you, very easily the next year or the next life cycle.

Leave it in the ground after they bolt, you'll be smiling next season because they're going to be absolutely abundant. Here's something interesting that I did not know until recently, is when arugula goes to flower you can actually harvest all the flowers as well if you want to. So, you can use arugula flowers in the salads if you don't want to save any of the seeds. That's something interesting about wild arugula.

When it comes to common arugula, which I also like to grow (to be honest, I have both of these greens in my garden), what's funny is I actually don't love it as is. For me, that pepperiness is a bit too strong and I need to cut it down, and so what I do is I will do a little shaved Parmesan cheese, I'll do a little olive oil, a little apple cider vinegar, and those combinations will cut that pepperiness just a little bit, put a little creaminess in there with that Parmesan cheese, and then I absolutely devour arugula. I'll put a couple eggs on top and there's my breakfast right there, and so one of my beds in my front yard is actually 100% dedicated to arugula because I just love it that much.

Normal Arugula

Now, when it comes to normal arugula, if you are in a hotter climate like I am, you may need to consider a shade cloth if you're in an area where the sun is just gonna be beating down on it all the time, then yeah, it's gonna try to go to seed or try to bolt relatively quickly and relatively early on in the season, which means that you're not gonna get as many successive cuttings from it as you would if it was in a colder climate.

I've noticed that recently, since it's late winter, spring-ish here in San Diego, we get a decent little chunk of rain and temperatures are a little colder and my arugula actually is really loving that, which is great, but I know that once the temperatures get back to normal here in San Diego it's going to try to go to bolt, and so I may need to relocate where I place my arugula to an area of my garden that gets a bit more shade.

So, I might put it in the bed that's closer to my house because that gets a little bit more shade, and I'll be able to get more successive cuttings. And so, it's sometimes not so much about purchasing a variety of arugula that's more heat tolerant. It's about cultivating it in a way that you can mitigate the effects of the heat, and so that's what I would consider when it comes to arugula.

Different Varieties

And of course, go ahead and give a couple different varieties a try as well. You can try arugula pronto, which is an interesting one. The foliage is very sharp and serrated. It comes from Europe. You can get that one at Rare Seeds, so that's gonna be the next one that I personally am gonna try growing, arugula pronto, because the ones that I'm growing right now have very thick, full leaves, which I enjoy, but maybe I want a little bit more variety in my garden.

So, I'm gonna try arugula pronto next time. There we have it on arugula!

Are you growing arugula in your garden?

Thanks For Reading!

If this is your first time reading my writing, thank you! Please leave a comment so I can get to know you better.

My name is Kevin and I run Epic Gardening, a website, podcast, and YouTube channel. My goal is to teach 10,000,000 people how to grow their own food.

I'm a big believer in Steemit and decentralized platforms, so I'm going all in on Steemit, dtube, and dsound. Be sure to check me out there too! You'll find me writing about gardening, travel, health, and philosophy - I can't seem to stick to one topic :P

Thanks and happy Steeming,

Kevin