$1000 Greenhouse grows Oranges without heating in snow

[Music] this is [Music] [Applause] insane my wife would not allow this in her house hey everyone today we're going to check out Citrus being grown in the high mountains of Utah we're here in Ogden and Chad the owner of the Farms we're going to see three in total today he's growing fruit trees in the middle of what looks like a suburb it's just so impressive and temperature right outside right now is a comfortable 30° so that is ne2 Celsius so we're pretty much freezing so let's check it out all right everybody we're here today with Chad Mitchell he's going to give us a tour of his amazing Farms growing citrus in the middle of winter this Farm is original 1850s property in Ogden the Pioneers actually farmed on this and so what we've done is we bought this property and we were very lucky to get it with water share because there's not very many properties left this was all under weeds and grass and what we did is over the last 10 years we've had a wood chip company Ernesto's tree service thank you out there bring in wood chips hundreds and hundreds of loads we've actually raised a property lineup feet and you got to see the soil it is so beautiful so here we have I see a lot of peaches and plums all of these are really really rare kind of peaches we have things like Florida Prince we have early treat we have a peach that comes on here at the same time apricots come on on in fact even earlier it's insane it's a little Peach but it's really really sweet so how old are most of these trees here so we bought the property in 2010 most of the trees are only 3 to 5 years old believe it or not you plant them and they grow within 2 years bearing and full bearing in 3 years this property has 6 feet of top soil that's what they told us when they dug the trees out that were on this property this property used to be Big Trees now it's all cleaned out and it looks really really nice and so you've been kind of doing the Garden of Eden wood chips yes stacking them so there's an area that we're going to see that's 5 ft deep so I need some requests out there what to plant my 5ft deep wood chip patch we also build mountains around the green houses and on those mountains we can also plant what should we plant on the mountains so this is your magic right here when we had a lot of snow a week ago this is like a volcano that's always putting out steam the snow melted off the top of this really quick and the rest of it was covered with snow these wit ship piles did not have any snow on so if you take a look that way we put wood chips around the green houses plus we can plant on the wood chip piles on the green houses so you can actually make the greenhouse a garden as well it's weird stuff I should call myself the Mt scientist farmer take a look at the soil notice the ground is frozen and we can actually work the ground makes it it's never too wet so we can always plant I could plant in this right now so the water actually comes through here this main ditch and it comes up through the Street it actually fills these ditches up then they go down the side it's automatic and we can actually just stand back and watch the water flow this thing is pretty much a no work set it and forget it Farm we don't have to weed anymore we don't have to water very much we don't have to till ever again I can spend my time at the farmer's market and not so much time having to farm so here's kind of where the wood chips are really high up here the wood chips are 5 ft deep take a look we're up high right now and so there's a lot of cool things and ideas that I got to figure out about planting and maybe even mushrooms all right so here we're going to check out the First Citrus Greenhouse it's pretty amazing let's see what we got there are no Services whatsoever on this property the only service we have is a water share in the middle of summer there are no other services as we open this up and take a look right at the entrance to the door we have a surprise it's unbelievable take a look inside guys wow these are oranges we have pamelo grapefruit right there we have tangelos on the side we have blood orange trees we have kumquat trees some of the trees produce a lot some of them do not produce they're really really fussy little trees but they're really really healthy and they're ready to go they're going to bloom in about 2 weeks and we are excited to see what they produce for next year these are pomelo grapefruits wow when it gets really cold they fall off the tree so we have to keep our eyes out and hope they don't fall off these are blood orange trees right here full size really cool that we notice at the very top where it gets really cold in a greenhouse this greenhouse is so warm none of the leaves freeze or anything so we're doing something right here never had thermal combustion or anything we've been 7° so this is really really cool stuff wow so the secret to all this is you have thermal storage with water yes and then you have the wood chips producing the heat do you have them in between the layers we do and we have bags of leaves and pretty much heating this with green waste garbage this is really weird stuff folks so you were saying you don't even buy the greenhouse plastic we go around to nurseries they take their greenhouse plastic off about every 5 years gets a little rip in it and they'll Bunch it up for the farmers and they'll sell it to us really cheap or they'll give it to us check your local greenh houses if there's one little rip in it we'll get a couple sheets we'll double it up and there's never going to be a rip in the same spot so it's really cost effective when this greenhouse plastic starts to degrade we just throw another layer this is your cumquat yes usually this is loaded with fruit but all these farm toys you're doing everybody's eating that's right all this has water in it these coolers have water everything so I originally thought you needed a lot of water and thermal mess and everything to do this and I learned and you'll see in Syracuse that we don't have to do all that we can grow really good Citrus without all the Water Mass but this is really overdone this is our warmest Greenhouse at the tops of the green housee where it gets really cold there's no freeze damage on the Citrus this is insane Chad gets about five bushels of Citrus without adding any heat I've had Greening houses before and the whole time during winter you're always worried about it freezing this is just a fire and forget this is really really cool if we walk out in the garden here I got to show everybody this we have this lemon spinach growing and this is a perennial it comes back every year so our idea is we don't want to keep planting and planting we want to have things that come back every year this is really really good it's called French soril the farmers markets we call it lemon spinach and it tastes really good tastes like lemon a citrus burst in a leaf it's really really really good it's really good on pizza kids love [Music] it all right everybody we're on Urban Farm Number Two this Farm is interesting because it has the absolute worst soil of any of the Farms that we Farm on it has only 18 in of top soil but wait till you see what we've done with it let's go take a look out B so we brought all these wood chips in and we've laid them down like we did at the first property we did something kind of weird we made volcano Mounds around them and so each tree has their own compost pile which is really cool and the trees took off they put four feet of new growth on in one year as we walk on the wood chips it's a lot like a sponge we don't have to water that much we don't have to till it all and the weeding problems pretty much gone so like the first Farm we can kind of set it and forget it in fact I've had trees I haven't watered the whole season they' survived this is secondary water in the city at the first property we have the sixth highest water share in Ogden so we're never going to lose water here we have secondary water and they have quite a bit of restrictions here cuz it's a desert and with all the new growth coming in it even makes it worse the water pressure is usually really bad and so you have to figure out a time to water when nobody else is watering or we don't have the water pressure to even do it so this greenhouse has these big straw Bells around it as you can see when we originally did this 10 years ago we had two semi trck of these big huge straw Bells it was humongous and the neighbors thought we were crazy as the straw starts to decompose and we had a lot of wind out here we actually put wood chips up around the straw and so in the greenhouse the straw is still decomposing which is helping to heat it and then we have these wood chips up around it the throw out steam as well let's take a look inside and as we go inside it is warm in here and we not only have citrus but we have strawberries growing so this is kind of cool we have multi-layer farming going on we have the Citrus up here on the ground we have the lemon spinach in the middle part we have strawberries it's going to be a big Strawberry Patch so as we go inside we also have the dut peach trees which are really big in here tons and tons of oranges on this tree blood orange tree next door so lots of lots of trees and lots of things growing in here so we take a look down here we have grapefruit some really nice Utah grown grapefruit right here lots and lots of oranges has some Mandarin oranges these trees are going to bloom some more big grapefruit right there and our biggest grapefruit of course is right here gu is big like a look at the size of that wow I didn't think I could grow grapefruit in Utah that big we continue on these trees are all going to be in bloom in about 2 weeks and lots of strawberry plants the strawberries are going in bloom too your doughnut peaches yes they're going to be in bloom in about a week or two so this thing's just going to brighten up these Citrus blooms smell really really good and so this whole thing is going to smell like we're in the middle of California so strawberry Citrus dut Peach is all blooming right now and so this one compared to the other Greenhouse you have way less thermal Mass right yeah a lot less water Mass we have a lot more of the straw on the side but a lot less of the water have these water jugs down here on the ground level because Citrus like to bloom a lot but they have a hard time holding the fruit 99% of the fruit falls off the trees this water keeps it cool so we can get better fruit set gotcha so you want it a little cool so a high tunnel has a hard time holding up to all the straw and everything and if I had to do it over again I would have had some really good bracing with the straw but we've built these shelves on the side and everything's holding together pretty good eventually an A-frame will be built and it'll just be nice A-frame Greenhouse in sight here and citrus is the easiest thing to grow here it's as easy as radishes believe it or not all I have to do is water it once a week with a timer during the summer fertilize it a little bit and it does really well as long as it has a happy place to grow so my goal with this is I want to produce fruit in the middle of Utah year around we have fruit during the summer I want winter fruit and so we have this and then we have indoor strawberries and they're just starting to produce so the idea is fruit year round so we can actually make the lower 48 states productive they can't produce anything during the winter and so I want to make that productive make it the bread belt that it should be all year so we're not having to import food so much we can be more self-sufficient so you can see this is crazy we're in his second Greenhouse no additional heating it just there's just citrus everywhere you know this is such abundance a greenhouse like this is going to cost you $33,000 or less in today's money you can put these in your backyard not only get soil out of it as it decomposes the straw and wood chips but you get amazing fruit at it and you can keep this system going we had a lot of extra straw left over so they built this Fortress and this is really cool it's like we go inside a wall ofen and this is kind of the idea of the organic matter breaking down inside we have leaves we have compost we have new citrus trees we have one of the most tender trees you can possibly plant we have some dragon fruit trees we just planted and they're doing really well we tried this 10 years ago and they died but now we have them again and they're surviving and doing really well so this is a really warm Greenhouse we have a lot of straw that's decomposing we've had to put supports up cuz the straw is trying to fall down but overall I think we're in pretty good shape [Music] all right so we're in urban farm number three Chad is going to continue the tour so in this Farm we have something really cool we have an extra growing zone we have the outdoor growing zone that goes from May to October we have the greenhouse growing zone that almost goes year round and we have an extra house that we own and we grow inside this house we have an indoor growing area and let's go take a look inside let's go in so this lemon spinach that's planted here is 400 Days old we cut it every 2 weeks and this has just been cut a few days ago we can keep harvesting it for the winter farmers market so this is the warmest Zone it's our home this is my 20-year-old dog jigs he's been part of this Farm almost ever since this began very important so as we come in here we have an oasis of indoor growing and we have the very first and take a look at the size of this strawberry humongous Utah grown strawberry take a look at that we have blossoms blooms everything is starting to grow really really well here we are we're going to try one of these delicious strawberries inhouse w wow the flavor is insane we have these little cool things plugged in our Outlets this little thing plugged in takes care of a lot of our pests we find these on Amazon they have a really high sound pitch that the pests don't like we always would have a lot of aphids in here and now the apid problems gone down to pretty much nothing the best Growers are ones that grow in closets so here we have Arrow guard Gardens shelves of Arrow Gardens and we're getting Tomatoes these are very very productive Tomatoes the tiny Tims and these are the Yellow Version really really productive so even in our laundry room closet I'm growing strawberries and the best Growers I know are the ones that can grow in the closet now that's not it we also started transplants in here so nobody lives in this house let's go take a look at the master bedroom my wife would not allow this in her house so I can start four flats at a time inside the house and then I can put them out in the greenhous start another four flats and keep rotating it around these are tomato plants they'll go out in the greenhouse later today so all of this I've killed the grass and we're putting this whole entire thing to strawberries the same strawberries that you saw inside the house and so this is going to be a big strawberry field and a lot better than grass I don't ever have to cut strawberries like I do the lawn this is some really really neat tomato cages we put these on their side and we cover it with plastic it makes a low tunnel if you take a look inside the broccoli looks really really good this is real cool too as we head out into our garden we see that we are in the middle of February and the whole entire Garden is sprouting in greens that's the lemon spinach we cut it like the grass it comes back every 7 Days outside in the summer very profitable little crop let's go take a look in here so when I originally did this we experimented with little green houses these are Harbor Freight tool green houses over here and as we look we can actually see the straw that we originally used right here that's within the greenhouse itself so the straw hasn't decomposed and as we look in here we're going to see most beautiful oranges you've ever seen and so it's amazing you can do Citrus in a little Greenhouse too all these coolers are filled with water we have pots up there that we grow strawberries in water system drip irrigation we turn the water on Waters it really easy look at the size of these this is what's amazing is we look at the Garden right out here it's already green we see the lemon spinaches coming up we see the green onions everything is perennial we like to plant things that come back every year and this greenhouse we call our Space Capsule Greenhouse this Greenhouse is the one that gives us tons of doughnut peaches in the summer let's take a look inside look how close our peach trees are to Blooming probably in one week these things are going to be blooming I get bushels and bushels of peaches out of here and so we have hundreds of strawberry plants in these pots what kind of strawberry plants do you know the name these are albon so it's an everbearing right yes day neutral everbearing lots more strawberry plants and then this greenhouse is also warmed enough to support Citrus so have some brand new citrus trees hundreds of strawberry plants how do you pollinate all these a lot of it sell pollinates but I come in here with a paintbrush and I pollinated about 200 blooms on each of the Citrus and the donut peach trees to guarantee a good crop this greenhouse produces insane amounts of doughnut peaches and strawberries and you first to Market because yes these are ready in what June these are ready in June the strawberries even before that and this greenhouse has a wall of grass clipping bags that we put in here and we covered this up with plastic at night so the neighbors didn't see it but this really got heated well with the grass clippings so if you look through here you can see some of the organic matter that we've had and this is kind of what we were talking about how we put it in between the greenhouse unit and the plastic and there's the organic matter right through there and then these were bags of grass clippings right here one question you're all going to have is do I keep the plastic on year round and the answer is yes because I mulch the green houses with this STW keeps it cooler in the summer all we do is open the windows up set it and forget it one man farmer that does all these Farms there's two others that we do as well and I do not have time to take plastic down do all this work it is easy simple we leave the plastic on use the windows these green houses are on year round this is like a cave this is like a pitous and I do not know how to build doors so I apologize you're going to notice these ones are really cool still and that's good we want them to stay really cool we don't want the green houses to have these big temperature swings this one stays really cool and so it's more like San Diego notice our transplants are doing really well we have broccoli in here we have strawberries we have citrus up here so just a little Harbor Freight Tool Greenhouse Water Mass everywhere and celery making a ground cover for us and look at these blood orange trees brand new little trees we planted in here lots of ground pots we'll put celery in and swiss chard where it's cooler and tomatoes and strawberries up there where it's warmer on average would you say you're spending per Greenhouse that one over there was only like $800 it's really really inexpensive I want everybody to be able to do this have citrus orchards in their backyard so we have more neighborhood farms and less neighborhood supermarkets so where can people find out more about you I'm on Facebook under Chad's mgy c h a DS m i d g l e y or on Tik Tok the Rockstar farmer Chad hope you guys enjoyed today's tour don't forget to like And subscribe so we'll put all the contact information for Chad if you guys have questions put them down below Chad is going to view them all and we'll see you on the next one bye

Channel: Stefano Creatini

Views: 126,379

Keywords: citrus farming, high mountains, utah citrus, fruit trees, winter farming, ogden farms, rare peaches, greenhouse gardening, wood chips, edible landscaping, food forest, citrus greenhouse, thermal storage, green waste, garbage heating, nursery stock, exotic fruits, mushroom planting, high altitude, citrus varieties, sustainable farming, permaculture, Utah permaculture, passive greenhouse, ogden utah, greenhouse permaculture

Id: 82wvDUi5UoQ

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024