"Field Vegetables and Garden Vegetables" Garden

Thousands of years ago, humans took vegetable and legume seeds from nature and cultivated them as agricultural crops. Sages knew how to identify the wild ancestors of vegetables and legumes and determined that the wild ancestor and the cultivated plant are one species.

In the garden you will find a variety of garden vegetables and legumes and next to them the wild plants from which they were cultivated. Most of them are the traditional varieties of the Land of Israel, donated by the Gene Bank at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Special and rare plants in this garden is, for example, Cicer reticulatum ,  the wild progenitor of chickpeas. It currently grows only in southeast Turkey, where it is believed to have been domesticated. Among the types of chickpeas, this one contains the largest amount of tryptophan, a rare amino acid that contributes to the creation of serotonin in the brain, a substance that makes a person calm and happy.