Leaves & salads
Rocket
Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa
Timings for your region
Suggested: Moderate · Explained in the glossary
Sow outdoorsmid March – late May and early August – early September
Harvestmid April – early July and early September – mid November
Practical tip
Bolts immediately in high summer and turns harshly bitter. Spring and late summer are the good windows.
Origin & history
Salad rocket comes from the Mediterranean and Western Asia and was already an everyday kitchen herb to the Romans under the name eruca. In German gardens it was then all but forgotten and only returned with the Italian food wave of the 1980s. Botanically rocket is not a salad at all but a brassica, related to mustard, cress and cabbage — its heat comes from the same mustard oil glycosides.
Varieties
Two different plants sit on the shelf under the same name: annual salad rocket (Eruca sativa), with broad lobed leaves, is ready in four to six weeks but bolts quickly. Wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) has fine, narrowly cut leaves, tastes markedly sharper, is perennial and re-shoots in the bed for several years. For quick supplies between other crops take salad rocket; for a permanent cutting patch take wild rocket. Both are open-pollinated and, once allowed to flower, self-seed readily.
Care
Thin to about 5 cm and then run it as a cutting patch: cut the whole row three to four centimetres above the ground and it will come again two or three times. Keep it evenly moist — drought stress makes the leaves tough and fiercely hot and pushes the plant into flower. Do not feed it; on a freshly manured bed rocket just grows big and bland. Cut wild rocket back by a hand’s width after flowering and a fresh set of leaves follows.
What can go wrong
Flea beetles are the main problem: tiny black beetles that turn the leaves into sieves in warm, dry weather. Fine-mesh crop netting from the day of sowing keeps them out reliably, and soil kept moist and hoed regularly helps too — late-summer sowings stay far cleaner than spring ones. As a brassica, rocket also belongs in the cabbage rotation: leave at least three years between it and cabbage, radish or mustard, or it helps clubroot build up.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Pick young, when the leaves are about a hand long — older and flowering plants turn stringy and very hot. Rocket barely keeps: loosely bagged, into the fridge and used up within two days. Add it to warm dishes only after they come off the heat or it collapses; the yellowish-white flowers are edible and look good in a salad.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.