"When I was 17 I was living in a house in Malta.
I’d just been laid off & was not in a good place. I’d graduated from high school early & was living on my own. I think my parents knew I didn’t want to be around them & was pretty determined to self-destruct, so they just let me go. Living at this house, I couldn’t walk anywhere, there was nothing around, just highway & I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t get a job. I was just there with a crappy boyfriend & this huge dog living in a house that was… not good. We didn’t have much money so we just ate what was already in the pantry, which was powdered cheese soup & hot dog buns. Then, one day we were down to zero dollars & zero cents & there were no more hot dog buns & no more cheese soup. I was legitimately hungry & I had no idea how I was going to get food. Maybe someone would bring me something? I didn’t know what I was going to do. Sitting there, feeling so hungry, I thought ‘something has gotta give.’ That experience is burned into my memory. I’ve never felt that hungry & that helpless before.
Eventually I got out of that situation & moved to other bad ones, but did get a job at IHOP, which made me a killer bartender. Learning to run a giant section overnight & dealing with drunks really sharpened my skills. I eventually moved on to better bartending jobs & started making good money. At 22 I was able to buy my house.
Bluff City Cemetery & Fen have always been a special place for me. My mom used to take us swimming there. So when I found my house it was perfect. It was me & my daughter (I had her when I was 19). We had this tiny house, no debt & I had a good job making good money.
I met Michael on our birthday (it’s the same date). He was a chef & I was really into gardening, trying to grow my own food, but from a scarcity mindset. I had no idea what I was doing. He came in & helped me figure out the culinary end of it. Instead of just canning tomatoes, we started making tomato sauces. Instead of the pickles that never turned out, all of sudden they worked. The order of operation for foods, how to build flavor & how to make a sauce, just little things like that. I got really lucky.
I left my old bartending job, & started at a fancy place. Right around then I applied for the Elgin Farmers’ Market & got in. We had a really great manager that year & things took off. I had visited my mom’s friends in New York who had a farm & do farmers’ markets. Their thing was spring rolls. They told me “You need to be doing this. You’ve got all the ingredients already. If we can, you definitely can.”
I came from this place of scarcity & now, all of a sudden, I have all this abundance. I have time & support for the first time in my life. So it seemed like I should do something with it. The first year was insane. I didn’t really have a focus on what I wanted to do product wise, so we were all over the place. We had the spring rolls, & weird other things - a lot of plants, art work, some food preparations, but it wasn’t consistent. Over the next couple years I worked on it. Making the spring rolls really took off. I need to make shelf stable products tho. We live in a 900 sq ft house. It’s an old Sears home actually, on the Southeast side of Elgin. We’d renovated it to make it more like a commercial kitchen, but it’s still super small. Cooking is A LOT of work, as any back of the house person will tell you. So I need to start focusing on herbal products that stay stable longer.
Our company’s name, Bluff City Gardens, speaks to our heritage & what we wanted for our future. We have 15 raised beds. Some of the things we grow for just ourselves, but others we grow as an experiment to learn what we’d like to make. Right now we’re growing dye plants, like indigo, to make natural dyes. It’s a huge learning experience to try to pinpoint what I’d like our future business to be. We’d like to do something that sustains us holistically & gives back. I don’t want to go back to the restaurant industry. I think these years are for figuring that out.
Something we’d really like to do is a gift garden. People would come to work as if they were CSA members. They would learn & get their weekly CSA box. This would give people skills, community & food. We would do it at a reduced rate. People could apply based on income & then you’d get your fresh food. It was basically an educational LINK program. We’ve pitched it a few times to the city, but it’s been radio silence. Then I think Shared Harvest has been trying for 10 years. I think the community in Elgin wants these things, but for some reason it’s missing the collective will power to actually make them happen.
Our past experiences have so much to do with who we become and the way we treat certain situations. A lot of how I think now is influenced by my experience of waiting in line at that same church for food. When I see how much abundance I have & I see other people with so much abundance, I think ‘what are we doing? What is wrong with everyone?’ We could actually do something for our friends & neighbors who are legit struggling. The resources are here. The money is here. It’s a choice. I guess you don’t know unless you know, tho. I didn’t have the opportunity to think that 15 years ago, but now I’m in a different position. I have so much now. It feels like the natural way of things is to share it.”
Alex is the co-owner of Bluff City Gardens, a family run micro farm in Elgin, with her husband Michael. She holds a current ANSI accredited Food Safety Certification Management Certificate, Food Handlers Certificate, BASSAT & Allergen Training certificate & is planning on expanding her education into herbalism in 2022.
Follow her at @bluffcitygardens or visit bluffcitygardens.com