ON THE FARM

ON THE FARM LISTENING GARDEN

Celebrating 50 years of edible education at Camp Joy

BY EMILY BEGGS PHOTOGRAPHY BY DORIANA HAMMOND

Just off Highway 9 in the San Lorenzo Valley lies Camp Joy Gardens—a humble headwaters of California’s early sustainable agriculture movement. Established in 1971, the eden-like family farm is a hidden treasure in the redwoods and operates as an educational non-profit. Evergreen forests enshrine the farm’s diverse row crops, orchards, goat pens and beehives, which have been tended by cohorts of students and apprentices for more than 50 years. Camp Joy is far from alone in offering teachings on organic farming in the Monterey Bay area, but its notable founders and picturesque grounds have made it a Santa Cruz Mountains landmark, preserving a local legacy of connecting to nature through food production.

As I approach Camp Joy’s wide farm gate, a giant wood and metal sunburst, I’m greeted by a trio of McNab collies napping with one eye open under pear trees and a tangerine 1963 Chevy flatbed truck streaked with purple flames. Everywhere bees hum, and the riverine scent of the valley mingles with the fragrance of herbs and blossoms planted to please them.

For dozens of apprentices, summer campers and home schooled children, the rainbow patchwork garden and stained glass studded main house with its large, airy kitchen have served as a temple of sorts. Camp Joy is a place where many hands labor together under a shared covenant with the natural world, venerating the industrious honey bee and archiving the gifts of each season in ciders, jams, pickles, teas, salves and seed libraries. I’ve come to interview Jim Nelson, co-founder and legendary beekeeper, and Towhee Huxley, his daughter and Camp Joy native, both as a curious writer and a former student. In the late 90s, I was a summer camp participant ecstatically chasing insects down arbored garden pathways and filling my pockets with dangling string beans, wild blackberries and perfumed lemon verbena leaves along the way.

Jim Nelson founded Camp Joy after working with Alan Chadwick at UC Santa Cruz.

According to Nelson (with a little help from Bob Dylan), it was “a simple twist of fate” and “good fortune” that brought a 4½-acre former horse pasture under the stewardship of a group of UC Santa Cruz dropouts. Nelson and Beth Benjamin, daughter of American abstract classicist painter Karl Benjamin and to whom Nelson was formerly married, originally learned about the land during a visit to their mentor’s office at UC Santa Cruz. There, they spotted a letter pinned to the wall from Boulder Creek resident Cressie Digby offering up the property that would become Camp Joy Gardens. They accepted that offer and with a lot of help from friends, built a home, barns and a series of simple dwellings on the property.

Nelson and Benjamin’s mentor was Alan Chadwick, a man whose distinguished green thumb left its technicolor floral imprint on gardens from the United Kingdom to South Africa and then westward on to a sunny slope adjacent to Merrill College at UCSC. Nelson describes Chadwick, born in Southern England in 1909, as “other worldly folk,” a man who “seemed like he had stepped out of the pages of the library.” A lover of nature poetry penned by symbolist and romanticist poets like Yeats, Keats and Milton, Nelson was drawn to the former Shakespearean actor turned gardening revolutionary, known to intersperse fragments of English folklore with erudite discussions of nature’s exquisite inner workings. Chadwick more than occasionally barked his instructions on how to appreciate and attend to a garden, and was notorious for what Benjamin has described as “mercurial moods,” which left many students hungry for his teachings yet unable to access them. But it was in Chadwick’s garden that the seeds for Camp Joy were sown, germinating as a place where the garden itself serves as mentor and muse.

“Alan was hard,” Nelson recalls. “People wanted to learn his method, away from him.”

Like Chadwick but without the hard edge, Nelson is known for his playfulness, singing, love of the arts and fascination with nature—wild and cultivated. During my visit, he reveled in the magic of having held a hummingbird in his hand in order to free it from the barn loft—the same loft where his daughter Towhee was born in 1976.

In contrast with Chadwick, the form of education that Nelson helped establish at Camp Joy is about freedom, joint effort and weaving the learner into every aspect of farm life, from sprouting seeds to communal cooking.

“It’s the work that teaches you,” says Teri Chanturai, my beloved summer camp teacher, who married Nelson after his divorce from Benjamin. Chanturai lived and worked at Camp Joy from 1986 to 2004 and believes that the true lessons of the garden come from “working together with people to create something larger than yourself.” Paraphrasing Chadwick, as taught by Nelson, “You come to the garden because you love creation and if you pay attention, you learn things.”

On a walk through the garden, Nelson reaches for a sunset-hued crabapple while quoting a passage from Thoreau that juxtaposes the deliciousness of this same fruit, foraged and consumed on a hike in the woods, with the disappointment of eating crabapples back at his cabin.

Nelson’s daughter Towhee Huxley (far left) was born at Camp Joy and feels in tune with the “rhythm of the seasons.”

The environment that Nelson, Benjamin, Chanturai and others have created—coupled with the scenic beauty of Camp Joy’s location—is what transforms the mundane into revelation for so many people who have picked fruit along its pathways. A college-aged apprentice once shared a scoop of her shredded raw beet and carrot salad with me, splashed with rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, and dotted with sesame seeds. It was the kind of thing that as a 10-year old, I’d have turned up my nose to at home, but after eating it at camp, I never stopped making it for myself.

Benjamin, who now lives in her hometown of Claremont, California but remains an important advisor to Camp Joy, emphasizes the acute current need for “physical nature awareness and education” in our wireless, disconnected world.

Next in line to support the garden in continuing to fill this niche is Benjamin and Nelson’s daughter Towhee Huxley, who has quietly ramped up her engagement at the farm over the past few years. She has moved from an administrative support role to one-third of a farmworker team of three: Jim, Towhee and Lucia—an Italian rototiller named after an opera star. Camp Joy’s labor pool disappeared in the wake of a string of calamities over the past few years. Drought, the nearby CZU fires and COVID-19 put a temporary halt to the once steady stream of apprentices, but also instituted a necessary period of rest and reflection. A mother of two daughters with Nordic blue eyes and shoulder length white-gold hair, Huxley has worked as a massage therapist, birth and postpartum doula, food service employee and floral designer. She is well equipped to watch over the multitude of farm life cycles as they turn with the seasons and to midwife the next era of life at Camp Joy.

Huxley points out that “our culture is so much about doing more and doing all the things,” a mentality which has resulted in a lengthening list of crises for humans and nature. In response, she is embracing COVID’s cataclysmic pause and allowing the garden to enjoy a state of repose. The arrival of a resident wild duck, waddling wing to wing with its domestic cousin, is one affirmation that Earth appreciates a listening ear. When asked how she learned to care for bees, make cider from her dad’s crabapples, support goats in labor and keep track of the particular germination requirements for the plethora of flowers she grows each year, Huxley shrugs and insists that, having been born and mostly raised at Camp Joy, “the rhythm of the seasons is just kinda inside me.” For now, their ancestral internal calendar keeps the garden growing and will stock the shelves for annual plant and wreath sales. In the meantime, aspiring farmers and summer camp kids will eagerly await their turn to imbibe the invigorating nectar of garden-based living on whatever timeline the land dictates.

Emily Beggs is founder and lead chef of Kin & Kitchen, which specializes in ecology-minded private chef services for clients throughout California. She has a background in the anthropology of food and nutrition, and the menus she develops meld wellness-promoting ancestral recipes with local ingredients to create intimate and nourishing feasts.