Arugula Invasion in My Organic Garden

I have two gardens.  One is a raised bed garden out in the yard and the other is a container garden on my back deck.  The one on my back deck gets more TLC than the one in the yard. Since the container garden is right outside of the kitchen it’s easy to tend to.  The one in the yard isn’t as convenient. As a result, the container garden gets weeded regularly. Needless to say, the yard garden doesn’t.

This morning I decided to stop ignoring my yard garden.  I went out there to get rid of the weeds that had grown over the last few weeks.  I pulled no less than 2 5-gallon buckets worth of weeds and I wasn’t even halfway done.  It wasn’t until I reached my arugula seeds that I realized I wasted money purchasing them.  Most of the “weeds” I had been discarding was actually arugula.

Wanting to make sure the weeds were in fact arugula, I hopped on the internet and began to search. I found a post on thedemogarden.org website.  After looking at the photo of arugula in this post I was convinced my weeds were actually arugula.    The plants in this post look exactly like not only my planted arugula but also the “weeds” invading my garden.  Go figure!

Arugula vs Weeds Taste Test

No sense in continually guessing whether or not the weeds were arugula.  I decided to pull a few leaves of the arugula I planted and some of the arugula-like weeds.  I washed them off and tasted them both. Lo and behold! They tasted exactly the same!  Imagine that! I had tossed out 10 gallons of wild arugula! Fortunately, I’ve got another 10 gallons or more to go, so there’s no arugula shortage at my house.

In addition to a bumper crop of arugula, I also have an inordinate amount of yellow wood sorrel ( mistakenly called it clover). Neither of these tasty little gems did I plant.  My daughter is addicted to the lemony taste of the sorrel. Actually, sorrel’s lemony taste goes very nicely with the bitter taste of the arugula.  Nature is awesome!

Despite my lack of care and the chipmunks eating a hole through my protective gate (blast those critters), both of my gardens are coming along nicely.  The herbs, cucumber and squash leaves are growing and so are the tomato vines (not pictured here). I still have two raised garden beds to plant, but I’ve got so much going on that I’m not sure what to plant next.

I love this time of year!