Racey Rocket!

David and I are so very keen on our rocket this year! Last year we had just 6 plants from a nursery which seeded at the end of summer. We planted those seeds and are now starting to harvest our first crop! <<< Here is a photo of those very first 6 plants we bought from the shop. We didn't get much harvest from these 6 little plants, but we did enjoy immensely what we did manage to get.

When they seeded I carefully harvested all the seeds and put them in a brown paper bag to wait for the next spring. We ended up planting them on Sunday 24th October. They astounded us by shooting up within three days of planting, the weather was very warm and humid at the time. Here are our rocket babies at 5 days old. >>>

<<< But alas! Grubs were eating our rocket by 3 weeks! We decided the safest, healthiest way to remove them was by hand. The rocket should be ready to eat in just a few short weeks and we really didn't want to put poison on it! The grubs were a pretty green colour the same as the leaves so they were hard to spot. In the end we found them all but it took a few days, we guess we found about a dozen grubs.

>>> Here is our rocket at 4 weeks, you can lightly run your hand across the leaves and the smell of fresh rocket wafts up to you straight away. Its very fragrant and fresh. We made a chicken wire cage at week 4 in case any bigger predators like birds or lizards decided they wanted to eat our rocket. It's sitting on our outdoor table at the moment, so we can keep an eye out for any more grubs!

<<< At 5 weeks our rocket looks good enough to eat, so we did! It's best you don't leave it too long, or the leaves get too bitter. But we like the peppery taste to the crisp leaves. It's just so much nicer to pick a few leaves of greenery from the garden as you want them, better than buying a lettuce from the shop and having it wilt on you the very next day. I hate buying lettuce, it just seems like such a waste. Over the last 5 weeks, I think David fertilised a couple of times using an organic seaweed mixture.

>>> Here is our very first lunch with our first rocket of 2010! My sandwich is the one with the cucumber, David hates cucumber! What's up with that? Who knows, but at least we both love rocket!
/nomnomnom

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