Arugula in Cover Crop Blends: A Long-Season Brassica for Pollinators and Grazing

0:00 [Music]

0:04 Arugula is one of the more interesting Brassica plants that we have. Now most of you are probably familiar with arugula. You may have had it in a salad.

0:13 Spring mix, it's another name for it is actually salad rocket. So it's commonly used in some of those fancy salad mixes, but now this is more mature so it's going to have a higher.

0:25 Level of bitterness and what gives it that bitter flavor is there's a compound in the leaf called glucosinolates and those glucosinolates give it that bitter spicy flavor so you wouldn't necessarily.

0:35 Want to eat a whole plateful of this stuff, but as a garnish or an amendment to a salad mix, it's not too bad. Now the thing that we like about arugula is that it's really really

0:48 Different than all of these other brassas.

0:49 So Nathan, tell us a little bit about what's different about arugula than these other brassas that we looked at.

0:55 Yeah, absolutely. So this is early.

0:57 August and these were May planted test plots and here late into the season the aruga still looks really good so comparatively to the other brassas it's a much longer season plant so it's just.

1:10 Now flowering, so there's you can see the white flowering. It's probably been flowering for 3 weeks now or so. So it's later flowering and the leaves have held up to our Nebraska summer much much.

1:30 Pretty much run their course or are showing a lot of heat and insect pressure, and I think that's significant, especially for a Braska planted by itself in a mono strip like.

1:41 Like this is really impressive, and so what you're telling me, because there's no feeding on these leaves, that even grasshoppers don't like arugula, maybe if they had ranch dressing.

1:50 Because of that high level of glucosinolate, it's not going to be the most palatable plant to put in a grazing mix, so you wouldn't want to put a lot in but there are times when we.

2:01 Would not mind seeing some unpalatable plants like arugula, maybe flax, some of those in a grazing mix because otherwise the temptation is to graze everything off and you've got nothing left. So a few of these plants that aren't going to be grazed readily can kind of be marker plants. You know, if you see a cow start nibbling on this stuff, it's probably time to move them. But it's a great plant in a pollinator mix because of its late season blooming and its ability to stay green for so long. So arugula might be something that you want to choose for some of those summer mixes.