How to Grow Rocket

Rocket is one of the easiest salad crops to grow and you get quick results.
It is a pick and come again crop, just pick what you need daily. It is an ideal container crop suitable to grow on patios and balconies if you don't have garden space.
Rocket likes a sunny site, but not too much sun or just like lettuce,it will bolt and go to seed. For this reason, I think it is best grown in partial shade. Remove the flowers illustrated above right to keep the plant growing and prevent it from setting seed too early in the season.
The flowers are edible and can make an attractive addition to a salad. Well-watering the crop may help prevent bolting during warm spells.
Rocket can be ready to harvest within 4-6 weeks of sowing. You can extend the growing season for rocket, as with lettuce, by covering the crop with a cloche at the end of the growing season.
Flea beetle can trouble rocket, but it not too much bother. It will make small holes in the leaves, but they remain perfectly edible.

As shown in the images, Rocket is made up of lots of small individual plants, which means it is best grown from seed. The good news is that it is easy to grow from seed, and you can save seeds for use next year.
The seed is fine and needs to be sown in either shallow drills or blocks. Prepare the ground by raking until it is fine earth. Sow seeds into prepared soil evenly, but not too sparsely, so you have a reasonable density of plants to harvest from. Sow rocket shallow around .5 cm (1/4") into prepared ground. You can sow rocket from March to September. To reduce gluts, sow each fortnight. If your garden is in an exposed area, or the spring weather is poor, delay early sowings until April.

In the supermarket, all Rocket tends to very similar fairly uniform. However, there are different types of Rocket, which have slightly differently shaped leaves, and degrees of pepperiness in the flavour. Which to grow is a question of personal taste, all are fast growing and have the same growing requirements. Both cultivated and wild/herb Rocket, illustrated below, are easy to grow and both have the lovely peppery taste which Rocket is famed for. I find the cultivated rocket has more leaves and fewer stems and makes for a better salad, but there is room for both in the veg garden.

If you fancy trying something different, Suttons have a Native British Leaves 'Urban Forager Mix' which is a mix of native salad leaves, cut and come again and suitable for growing in containers.

To save Rocket seed, you must first let it flower. The flowers are illustrated above and are white. Let the rocket flower, once the flowers die back, the seeds will form. Pick the stems of rocket, with the seed heads attached and then set to dry so they become similar to the image below.