23/3/98

Funny farm

     If anything is possible - as we now know it is - then there’s no reason why Himalayan herbs grown by Tibetan monks cannot be cultivated by a Jewish lady in the netherlands of the arid Arava.
     If not for those damn Israeli weeds.
     Elaine Solowey doesn”t see the desert as desolate wasteland. She’s been coaxing green out of the grit for a quarter century, bucking conventional wisdom all the way.
     “Onions,” she was told. “If you want to grow anything out here, grow onions.”
So of course, this Quixote of Kibbutz Ketura just had to plant jojoba and lotus and aloe and even more bizarre things you’ve never heard of, covering 80 dunams with experimental crops that have to be seen to be believed.
     Nu? Put on a hat and come take a look!
     We start the Ketura Funny Farm tour with a breathtaking face-to-face encounter with neem.
     “Really hot stuff now. The seeds are used for Tibetan, Chinese and Indian medicine. The leaves are made into disinfectant and insecticide that don’t harm mammals, fish or birds - just bugs. The twigs are used for cleaning teeth. Neem can be put in toothpaste, and now some companies are putting it in chewing gum because it has good effects.” (Such as keeping bugs off your teeth.)
     Elaine takes us past a pomelo graveyard, remnant of a small orchard that was aborted because the kibbutz commandeered its water. Nothing there now but dead fruit and thriving weeds.
     Damn weeds.
     We amble on.
     “Over here, the Golden Cinquefoil, or potentila, very good for the liver. Grows rather slowly. It’s probably the most finicky plant here, and needs a lot of weeding.”
     Truth is, I can see weeds, and odd inverted mushrooms, and plenty of moss -- but nothing golden, nothing resembling a cinq or foil. Elaine beckons me to bend for a closer look. “You see them? These are the ones I want. Those tiny guys with little duck’s feet.” (That’s how she really talks. She’s from California.)
     This potentila is one of the Himalayan herbs Elaine is growing on consignment for the Swiss medicinal company Padma. Hadassah Hospital has been actively supportive in the project. (The project also has the blessing of no less than the Dalai Lama himself.) Together, they are trying to make sense of a mysterious, and ancient, medical tradition.
     It’s a tough nut to crack because these herbal compounds are very complicated.
“The thing about Tibetan medicine is they don’t give you a certain herb for a certain condition. There are these recipes that according to your physical type are meant to strengthen the body enough that you can overcome the illness. It’s not the magic-bullet theory.
“I’m doing experimental work with a root they’re missing, and a few little odds and ends they’d like me to try.”
We move on to the argania orchard. “It”s a herb from Morocco that lowers cholesterol in the blood, a delicious oil, and it has cosmetic, anti-aging properties, as a restorative for skin. It”s great for chapped or inflamed skin.”
Elaine suggests we see the pitaya (That’s the real reason I’ve come here).
We enter a huge net-covered area full of gangly, spiky cacti. “This is the commercial section: 62 plants long, 35 rows wide. Probably the biggest pitaya house in the world.”
The thing about Elaine is, she speaks with apparent sleepy indifference. A shrill PR dynamo she is not. But it’s a deception: this lady is a doer. This sprawling oasis is entirely her creation.
“We were getting NIS 15 per fruit. Oh yeah, people were paying it. Pitaya’s very special. 
“There’s a little one, let’s eat it now. It’s very peelable, you get a totally solid lump, and the seeds are edible... That”s right, just crank off the outer layer... What color! That’s really, really red. Like gleaming crimson, speckled with black seeds.”
Slurp, slurp, slurp. Oh God, oh wow, this is, ohh, unbelievable....
Not that it matters, but this ball of joy is healthy too. It’s loaded with vitamin C, “and you feel like you’ve eaten a very, very large, rich dessert, but you haven’t because it’s mostly water. Pitaya is fat free and low calorie, yet sweet.”
It”s also a great way to stain your face and fingers crimson.
“I think there’s a pitaya for everybody’s taste, because they come in so many colors and flavors: white in the middle and pink on the outside, which tends to be sweet-sour; red-red, which are quite sweet; purple-purple, purple-red, and a yellow that’s delicious but