Sea Rocket

Sea-rocket (Cakile edentula), this member of the mustard family is one of my favourite wild plants  for summer salads and stir-fry.  It is best to dice the fleshy sea-rocket leaves up into small pieces as they have a horseradish flavour only milder and saltier. This plant needs to be experimented with a bit as I see few recipes around for it and it seems a natural for fresh salsa and possibly as a pesto ingredient.

Sea-rocket often grows in patches well out onto sandy beaches, usually being the closest plant to the high tide line so it is very salt tolerant.

A healthy patch of Sea-rocket. This plant grows on both the east and west coast of N.A and also in some areas along the Great Lakes

Here are some (un-tasty) sea-rocket seed sprouts, I suspect only one sprout will likely survive here packed this close together, but luckily for many of these seedlings they will be coming home with me to be potted to produce seeds. These sprouts are from the bottom half of a 2 part seed pod as they remained attached to the parent plant and become buried in the shifting sand over the winter,  the upper pods on these plants are somewhat rocket shaped and often separate from the parent plant and are transported from the beach to  shores possibly great distances away. Oddly the sprouts and older leaves of this annual are not near as enjoyable to eat as the leaves in between these 2 stages of growth.

Just to the right of the sea-rocket seedlings are a few (darker green) Orach plants which are another good seaside edible which I’ll do a post on later.