Salt Lake's farmers market opens summer eating season with a day of sunshine

SALT LAKE CITY — Chad Midgley’s farmers market booth stands out like a sore green thumb.

The 32-year-old, full-time gardener keeps in constant motion, calling out like a carnival barker to the hundreds of people milling through the packed north end of Pioneer Park.

“Only one box left! Lemon Spinach! Great flavor! It’s selling out! Who says the economy is depressed!”

It’s mid-morning Saturday, a bright, blue-skied season-opener to the Salt Lake Downtown Alliance’s 19th annual Farmers Market.

The open-air, produce-craft-food-art and “other” market will run each Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Oct. 22. And Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to dusk, Aug. 9 to Oct. 25.

Midgley offers samples to the hesitant. For the unprepared, the tart leaf knocks the chin back and puckers the mouth. Just like lemons. The flavor sells itself.

But his booth lacks the professionally printed banners, the eye-catching logos, the boutique-style packaging offered by many of the other vendors. He’s stuffed sheaves of the spinach into large Zip-Loc bags, which are packed into large Dole banana boxes.

In the next booth over, Chad’s father, Paul Midgley, can’t compete — neither in energy nor in customers. That seems to content him. He offers a few basil and horseradish plants for $5 each; Cherokee Purple tomato plants, $2 apiece.

Apologetically, he motions to a bucket of freshly harvested garlic still on the stalks. The heads are about an inch in diameter. Crops are at least a month behind this year, he says. The fields have been too wet to plant.

He forms a circle with his thumbs and forefingers three inches across. “Normally, they would be about like this.”

A retired Union Pacific worker, his gardening is for fun — his life doesn’t depend on it.

His son’s does. It’s Chad Midgley’s only job, and with his passion for green, he’s done well. His house, cars and debts are all paid off, Paul says — clearly pleased. “There aren’t a lot of people these days who are his age, doing what he’s doing.”