BOUNTIFUL—Grapefruit, peaches, figs – in Utah in the winter? Farmer Chad Midgley has figured out the trick to growing citrus trees and other fruits in spite of the ups and downs of Utah’s seasons. Stroll through the Bountiful Farmers Market any given Thursday and he’ll be there selling his fresh fruit.

“I started 28 years ago,” said Midgley. “I actually helped start the Bountiful Farmers Market in 1998. It went for a year and then it kind of stopped for a couple of years and then a lady by the name of Mary Carpenter started it up again. So it’s been going for almost 28 years and it’s still going strong.”

Midgley said it all started when he was farming with his dad. “It was my dad and a bunch of old timers from West Bountiful. When I was a kid in the 80s there were still some old timers alive that were born in the late 1800s. So I got these ideas just kind of hanging around those people to make a milk house like cows live in and turn it into a greenhouse.”

It doesn’t require heating or cooling, he said. “I’ve been able to figure out how to grow full-sized citrus trees in Utah without any heaters or cooling or anything. I have a 20 foot tall grapefruit tree on my farm in Ogden.”

It’s growing out the greenhouse window, said Midgley. “It’s about 10 feet out. I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do with it. I’m probably going to have to cut it back.”

Midgley has started making videos to show others what he does. “It’s really cool. I have fruit that’s huge. I have pomelo, grapefruits, oranges, tangelos and kumquats. So I do these videos on these things and I’ve been seen by some pretty famous national people.”

He’s been posting his videos and reels online. “That’s how easy it is to get discovered these days if you have a unique talent. I’ve been on Fox National. My gosh, just to grow some orange trees and things.”

Midgley calls the different greenhouses hobbit whole greenhouses. “That’s where we have orchards and it doesn’t cost a dime. The greenhouses are heated with compost decomposing in between layers of plastic. Then water mats inside of them.”

He said he’s not coming up with this on his own. “I think it’s these ancestors of old channeling energy out to us farmers while we’re out in the field working. There’s nobody out there and we just get these ideas.”

It’s kind of what makes the Farmers Market more fun, Midgley said. “You can talk to people about some of the stuff we can kind of keep growing in Utah even into the winter. The goal is to have fruit year round.”

The citrus is ready to harvest in the spring, said Midgley. “So the idea is you have apples you can eat during the winter and we can grow strawberries into the winter. Then in the spring you start eating citrus grown in Utah. So you can kind of be self-sufficient if we can get this going just a little bit more.”

Midgley said he came up with the idea to use the milk house when he was driving around Anaheim, California. “I’m a Disneyland junkie. I was looking at the citrus trees with fruit. I wanted to take that home and have that year round. I had to grow these things because it reminded me of being in California and Disneyland.”

The milk house never freezes, he said. “I thought, ‘why not convert it into some sort of greenhouse?’ You have these citrus trees around and you have a forever Disneyland in your backyard so I played around with it.”

There’s also an eight foot tall palm tree in his front yard. “All I do is put it up against the house on the south facing side in Syracuse,” said Midgley. "I just cover it a little bit during the winter and it survives and it’s beautiful.”

Palm trees are pretty hardy, he said. “St. George can keep them alive without any protection. This is a Mexican fan palm that I bought in Las Vegas. The south side of the house throws some heat off and at night the house actually throws heat out about a foot. It doesn’t freeze very hard unless it gets down in the 20s.”

It’s probably one of the larger palm trees in northern Utah, he said. “There’s some other people that have got this figured out in Salt Lake, which is a little bit warmer than Syracuse. But this one looks pretty nice.”

The farm pretty much takes care of itself, Midgley said. “All I have to do is put it on a water timer during the summer and it’s good to go. I have 20 of these devices. There’s no way I could take care of all of this. I’m pretty much a one man farmer with five farms.”

Midgley said people are always begging farmers to come to their markets because there’s not a lot of farmers left. 

Selling at so many Farmers Markets, Midgley has met a lot of interesting people. “There were some missionaries,” he said. “They showed up one time and wanted peaches for President Monson. I smelled every peach and gave them the best ones I had. Then they came back about six months later with a picture of President Monson and his peach pie. He said that was the best peach pie he ever had.”

Midgley sells at the Bountiful Farmers Market every Thursday. Find him on Facebook and Instagram @chadsmidgley.