Granddaughter Takes Up the Mantle of the Nature Lyceum

When the late Jeff Frank founded the Nature Lyceum in Westhampton in the early 1990s, his motivation was to promote a better future for his grandchildren, with nutritional food and healthier spaces free of toxic pesticides.

Frank died, for the second and final time — he was dead for several minutes once but went on to live for several more years — in 2012, at the age of 65. But today his youngest grandchild, 25-year-old Kelly Kessenich, has taken up the mantle.

Kessenich furthers her grandfather’s mission with the Nature Lyceum’s online presence, including a podcast, and she leads workshops. Ultimately, her goal is to establish a new base for the Nature Lyceum where children can get more in touch with the Earth and where their food really comes from.

“I took to my grandpa when I was a kid. We were thick as thieves,” Kessenich said in May during an interview at KK’s The Farm in Southold, an organic and biodynamic farm where she apprenticed.

Kessenich said that when her oldest sibling, Beth, was born in 1990, that drove her grandfather to promote organics and a healthy way of living. “The kids need it the most,” she said.

In fact, one of the first things he worked at was to convince groundskeepers to stop spraying chemicals on kids’ playing fields.

“We’ve got to make this world safer for the grandkids,” she said of her grandfather’s advocacy. “They don’t need to be running around in chemicals.”

He also taught golf course superintendents from all over Long Island the organic alternatives to chemical pesticides linked to cancer.

Frank had said the Nature Lyceum was the only school in North America teaching organics on a regular basis. He offered pop-up workshops and a two-day crash course on topics that aligned with the Nature Lyceum’s mission. He called it a “school for environmental horticulture.”

The alumni called it the “Jeff Frank Mystery School,” because they never knew what they were going to get when they took the course again, and they called themselves the “Green Guerrillas.”

“You could do the course once, or you could do the course 20 times,” Kessenich said. “There was always something different in the mix. He had teachers come from all over the country.”

One course might have been about bees, microbes and organics, then another would be about biodynamics and native plants. “It was kind of like the pick of the day, what you’re going to learn,” she said. There was always something different in the mix.

Kessenich first thought she would re-create what her grandfather had done, but in light of her background working with children, she envisions a camp and school for kids that will provide accessible child care.

“He was very adult-oriented in what he did, even though the mission was for the grandkids,” she said of her grandfather. She said she wants to find a place where kids can learn and experience things — the things she learned from her grandfather as a child.

“You don’t need your phone. You don’t need to be in front of an iPad,” she said. “You can be outside getting dirty, learning about the planets and how that affects us, and how it affects plants and what lives in our soil.”

She spoke of the disconnect — what’s lost on people. “Kids think that food comes from a shelf now,” she said, explaining that she wants to “build back the bridge” of understanding where quality food comes from.

The Westhampton Beach High School graduate said she loved her grandfather’s message but went down the art route and thought she would just tell stories. She began studying documentary photography and printmaking at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia in 2017.

“I was driven to document food and people growing out there,” she said of her time living in Georgia. She went on to work with single-parent families who couldn’t afford good child care and had little access to quality food.

She would take kids to farmers markets and farms, and document it.

“Kids really need more of this,” she said. “Parents really need more of it, too, but it’s so much easier to get through with the kids. And every parent wants good opportunities for their kids.”

She graduated from SCAD with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2020, but her final coursework was completed online because the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to in-person classes. The pandemic also precipitated her return to Long Island and a shift in her life plans.

The change in her started when she was still down in Georgia, and her parents called her from the East End. “We haven’t had a vegetable in two weeks because all the city people came out and bought a bunch of the food before the locals knew what was going on,” they had told her.

Kessenich was determined. “I’m going to grow food,” she recalled thinking. “We’re never going to be in this situation again.”

She turned to one of her grandfather’s former students, Ira Haspel, who founded KK’s The Farm with his late wife, Kathy Keller Haspel, known as KK, who was a student of and later a lecturer for the Nature Lyceum.

“Ira opened up with loving arms his farm to me to come and apprentice, and I started working with the Biodynamic Association and learning more about what my grandpa was really into,” Kessenich said.

According to the Biodynamic Association, biodynamics is “a holistic, ecological, and ethical approach to farming, gardening, food and nutrition.”

“It’s a way of farming that’s not necessarily organic, but some describe it as ‘beyond organic,’” Kessenich said. “It is a way of using natural resources that you can either grow on your farm or source from ethical practices around New York.”

Biodynamic farms use plant and soil sprays and compost additives called “biodynamic preparations” to improve soil fertility and plant vigor. The compost preparations are made with fermented chamomile, dandelion, stinging nettle, oak bark yarrow and valerian.

“A big part of what people know of biodynamics to be is stuffing cow horns with cow poop,” Kessenich said.

The manure-stuffed horns are buried for half a season then dug back up once the manure has decomposed into microbe-rich humus-like material — humus being the organic matter that remains when plant and animal material breaks down. “It adds microbes to the soil,” Kessenich said. “It builds soil structure. It’s just this overall great thing to spray on your land.”

The humus-like material is diluted in a very specific way before it is used as a spray. Haspel explained that two tablespoons are added to three gallons of rainwater and stirred biodynamically — making a vortex, then turning the other way to make chaos.

“To scientific people, you can say that, well, you’re increasing the oxygen content, but really what you’re doing is two things: substances and forces,” Haspel said. “You’re attracting positive cosmic forces. The whole thing about biodynamics is ‘bio’ is life, ‘dynamic’ is force, and we pay attention to the life force — is what Jeff always taught us — in the plants, the people and the soil.”

And in another biodynamic preparation, the horns are filled with silica dust made from ground-up quartz. “It’s very alchemy driven,” Kessenich said. “You can spray these things on your farm and they bring the forces into your farm to have everything act as a whole organism and really just a healthy natural way of using everything — bringing everything together.”

Biodynamics was conceived of in the early 20th century by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian founder of the anthroposophy (“human wisdom”) spiritual movement. Biodynamic adherents apply the preps according to lunar cycles.

“You’ll have days that are root days, flower days and leaf days,” Kessenich explained. “Naturally, on root day, it’s great to sow carrots, sow potatoes, things like that — things that are roots. On flower days, it’s great to sow flowers. Leaf — lettuces and arugula.”

It has a religious element to it, a spiritual element, but also driven in some scientific fact, she said. “There’s not a whole lot of science behind it, but if you talk to biodynamic practitioners, everyone will give you a little bit of a different way of explaining it.”

Haspel said biodynamics enlivens the soil to allow it to receive cosmic influence in a positive way.

It’s easy for people to understand how the sun provides life-giving, plant-growing energy, he said, “but all the other stars in the galaxies and the universe are also sending us information and energy.”

Kessenich’s grandfather did not have an agricultural background before discovering organics and biodynamics. Frank was from a blue-collar family in Freeport, on the south shore of Nassau County. She said the Franks relocated to Hampton Bays, including his sister, Mary Fitzgerald, who continues to run the Fitzgerald Gallery on Main Street in Westhampton Beach.

“No one was a farmer, but he had this hippie side to him,” Kessenich said. “... His brother went off to Vietnam, and after that, he was kind of, like, ‘There’s another way to do everything.’ And that ventured him down into organics.”

She explained that area farmers then were practicing conventional agriculture, not because they didn’t care about the earth but because they didn’t know another way.

“Now, people have so many preconceived notions about organics,” she said. “When my grandpa was starting, no one knew what organics was. They genuinely came to the Nature Lyceum to learn about it.”

Frank partnered with Steve Storch, who later founded Natural Science Organics in Water Mill. “Steve is a real expert on organics and biodynamics and alternative ways of healing the earth,” Kessenich said. “So once my grandpa linked up with him, it was kind of like a meeting of the minds.”

She apprenticed with Storch in 2020, amid the pandemic, learning how he makes compost teas and biodynamic preps.

Storch said that he began dabbling in biodynamics in the 1980s and developed stirring machines and a vortex brewer to make compost tea and inoculants. He taught about biodynamics and compost for the Nature Lyceum. He described Frank as funny, creative and intelligent.

Frank would get everyone from “flaky hippies” to tree maintenance workers at his courses, Storch said, because Frank got certified through New York State to teach commercial pesticide applicator courses.

However, rather than teaching them how to use chemical pesticides, Frank would explain to them all the hazards that chemical pesticides posed to humans and the environment. He taught organic alternatives — and he turned them into converts.

“A lot of these guys would come and take my grandpa’s course, and by the end of it they were, like, ‘Never mind. We don’t even want to do what we came here for,’” Kessenich said.

“All kinds of different people would show up to this thing,” Storch said, “and it was awesome to see people and their hearts open. When they left, everybody was like brothers and sisters.”

He is pleased to see Kessenich continue Frank’s legacy. “I’m really happy that she’s taking up the mantle,” he said. “We’ve tried before, but without the bloodline energy, it kind of stalls out.”

Kessenich has also worked under Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto, the co-founders of Feisty Acres, a poultry farm in Peconic. “They were my mentors,” she said.

She emphasized how well taken care of the birds at Feisty Acres are and how her perspective on raising animals for food has changed. “It’s not all bad,” she said. “You can find farmers who do good things for their animals.”

She noted that she had been a vegan for a while, because she thought that was the best thing for the environment and the animals — and now she slaughters animals once a week for Feisty Acres.

“It’s just one bad day in the slaughterhouse — they don’t even know it’s one bad day,” she said.

Taking away stigmas around eating meat and drinking milk is one of her goals. “It’s very normal to use resources that we have in front of us that we take care of,” she said.

Another thing she wants people to understand is price.

“Everything’s going up in price,” she said, “but if it’s really cheap, somewhere down the line someone’s not getting paid, or an animal is being mistreated.”

Kessenich recently moved to Mattituck and works at Treiber Farms and Indian Neck Farm in Peconic in addition to helping at Feisty Acres. She calls herself a “traveling farmhand.” But, ultimately, her plan — considering how expensive land has become on the East End — is to find an affordable upstate property where the Nature Lyceum can welcome children year-round.