Fill the bed of your pickup truck with topsoil. Provide a thin layer of sand beneath the soil for drainage, through the crack at the tailgate. Plant a few rows vegetables. Keep the soil moist. Do not exceed posted speed limits.
You are now well on your way to being a nomadic land owning farmer, no longer bound to the land the way farmers were in previous millennia. Grow crops in a favorable climate year round, sell the freshest produce door-to-door.-- Laughs Last, Nov 02 2003 Urban Hunter Gatherers http://www.halfbake...0hunter_20gatherersPrior (halfbake) Art. [Laughs Last, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004] Morris Traveller http://www.gerardsg.../BCAP/Traveller.htmpainting [hippo, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004] (?) Morris Traveller http://www.national...osito/60morzuki.jpgwhy? [hippo, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004] (?) Just for fun: harmonic oscillations http://www.rawbw.co...ang/myGUI/TwoC.htmlWave pattern for two variables with 'springs'. (Think "corn fields on flatbeds in convoy".) Click [Init] then [start] [Tiger Lily, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004] A (new) visual... http://www.ho0sier....lisse/old_truck.jpg(It's ok, I just found another one) [k_sra, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004] A visual... http://www.bluerose...mages04/truck5b.jpgThey moved [k_sra]'s link on her. I guess that's the price of a nomadic garden - knowing where it's parked. [Worldgineer, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004] "suitably expensive cash crop" - I guess then it would help to keep moving! But you'll want a glasshouse over the flatbed, or those crops are going to get blown flat before you can harvest them.-- DrCurry, Nov 02 2003 I would think the harvest quite teeny. You'd need a fleet of these.-- waugsqueke, Nov 02 2003 I was inspired by my recent purchase of a used pickup truck with a topper, and the resilience of the potatoes that I grow inside my apartment (rented flat). If you really want to pursue this idea for gardening, don’t plant rows, use an interplanted hexagonal grid.
Exposed crops will only get blown over when driving into the wind. Don't do that.-- Laughs Last, Nov 02 2003 If you could turn your produce into organic veggie soup, cooked by the heat of the engine as you drove from pitch to pitch, I'd buy.-- Fishrat, Nov 03 2003 If we grow produce like carrots, radishes, potatoes, etc. we wouldn't have much worry about the wind blowing stuff over. And we'd could readjust the aim of the windshield washer jets to spray over the cab to water the crop. Being a pickup owner myself, I like this idea.
For someone else's truck, of course, not mine.-- Canuck, Nov 03 2003 I wonder if the resultant vibration would disturb the plants.
Certainly all that extra mass is going to negatively affect your fuel efficiency, which is not very environmentally friendly.-- beland, Nov 03 2003 Croissant. Love it. But I think you should go for the 40ft flatbed... a fleet of them.
Convoy! as Kris Kristofferson would say.-- Guy Fox, Nov 03 2003 "So, are you a nomadic hunter-gatherer free-spirit type, or are you a farming, soil-tilling, settler type?""Both!"-- hippo, Nov 03 2003 I think it's a nifty idea, but I would expect that the soil would eventually oxidize the bed of the truck.-- cheesinglee, Nov 03 2003 I used to drive a Morris Traveller (see link for an example) which had grass and moss growing along the (structural) wooden sections at the back of the car.-- hippo, Nov 03 2003 Imagine the harmonic oscillations of corn crops on flatbeds coming through town. [link]:b-- Tiger Lily, Nov 03 2003 What kind of music would you play from the big loudspeaker on the roof when you drive down my street?-- stringstretcher, Nov 03 2003 Music from a loud speaker on the roof?
Shucks, don't-chu guess we'd be hangin' our bare toed limbs off dem flatbeds singin' all dem bakers' remakes a' old Uncle Remus songs? Jus'a _o-scillatin'_ ourselves to dat muzik, we'd a be doin' -ye' sir...-- Tiger Lily, Nov 03 2003 Pumpkin patches? Carrots? Radishes, and potatos? No NO NO! This thing is for DRUGS! Yippie! (+)-- Madcat, Nov 03 2003 yeah, if you're looking for an expensive crop, some chronic sticky green monster blunt material is your best bet.-- Eugene, Nov 03 2003 That would make it possible to migrate the whole garden to follow the plants' ideal climate, eventually allowing mother nature to select new species that don't need to adapt to a given territory.-- MagoWiz, Nov 04 2003 this would work well, and no prob's with lack of space. plenty of people get good crops of e.g. lettuce, radish, carrots, tomaytos etc in window boxes. the bed of a pick-up would have much more space.
you could take it to work, nip out into the car park at noon, and just imagine how fresh your lunch would be (as long as no naughty person had pillaged it!)-- ivanhoe, Nov 04 2003 You could start a transportation service in the urban areas... costs nothing to get on, but will cost you two dandelions to get off! My music reference was more related to the ice-cream man's truck... I would play some roots music.-- stringstretcher, Nov 04 2003 You could grow corn and sugarbeets to make fuel for your garden auto. Or, drive the truck around to area schools in dense urban areas so that kids can see where those fries come from. Ooooohhh, yuck, they have DIRT on them!-- stringstretcher, Nov 04 2003 Don't use it to grow crops, just to take them to the farmer's market. They'll be fresh picked (or dug) right before the customer's eyes. And you can jam a whole lot of produce close together, because it doesn't actually have to grow in that environment.-- EvilHomer, Nov 04 2003 I read about a farmer getting seven acres of produce from one acre of land by making an entirely edible ecosystem. I think he called it a seven layer garden. You could use this idea on a large truck but you'll need some pretty stunted fruit trees. You might want to graft on branches of different fruit trees to maximize your yield too.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 04 2003 Put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up! Drive thru a car wash peel the potatoes with the high pressure water hose.-- stringstretcher, Nov 05 2003 Hey kids, look! It's the deadly nightshade truck. Yaaaay! +-- sartep, Nov 05 2003 There are certain places in the US where you would not be welcome, due to agriculture regulations. For fear of transporting some kind of crop eating insect or whatnot, you would most certainly be off with your (legal) crop-- stringstretcher, Nov 05 2003 Yeah, and if you're in the UK you'd better make sure that's not GM maize you've got in the back, mister.-- -alx, Nov 05 2003 Already, more than 50% of the cost of agricultural goods is used for transporting and distributing them. Now, consider that you're not only transporting the edible parts, but the whole plant, soil, water, and green-house, and you're looking at very very expensive produce (which also increases its likelihood of theft). Also, you couldn't use your truck to go skiing anymore, or go to the desert. And you couldn't use your truck to haul furniture or other things.
You'd be paying tons of money for this in high gas bills, and in reduced use of personal capital.
The way people can get so much produce from so little land is when they get the roots really deep (typically >1.5 meters). This would add even more mass to your truck.
Maybe a more realistic idea, but still uneconomical idea would be to have large plastic trays that you could grow things in <b>on the ground</b>, and then when it was ready to bring to market, you could use a forklift to put these onto a truck to have a "pick from the garden experience" at a market.-- sophocles, Nov 05 2003 "So you live in your car?" "It's not so bad. I always have fresh fruit and the kids have a treehouse in the back."-- Worldgineer, Nov 05 2003 If this was implemented with a solar-powered truck/flatbed, I'd like it. If it's a gas vehicle, however, it not only cancels out any monetary surplus you might make, but makes it extremely environmentally unfriendly..-- Pseudonym #3, Nov 05 2003 How about bio-diesel? You could grow the fuel onboard.-- Worldgineer, Nov 05 2003 good living. +-- k_sra, Nov 06 2003 Worldgineer and I are on the same track, and a lot of the exhaust from the bio fuel is water and CO2-- stringstretcher, Nov 06 2003 Sounds cute, but growing the bio-feul won't work.
Unless you were also driving around with massive refinement capabilities, you'd destroy your engine every day or so.
And if you had solar panels, then how would the plants get sun? Remember that plants are essentially solar too.-- sophocles, Nov 06 2003 No "massive refinement" required. Just an olive oil press.-- Worldgineer, Nov 06 2003 wow jonny appleseed gone trucker-- Evenessence, May 19 2004 It surprised me where the annotations on this idea went. I had only intended to propose landless gardening in a pickup truck, for personal consumption and hobby. It hadn't occurred to me that people would want to have an economically or environmentally feasible commercial farming version.-- Laughs Last, May 19 2004 I found a bunch of grass growing in the bed of my pick up the last time I cleaned it out.-- Imathinker, Jul 15 2004 This is a fabulous idea. I think if we can get used to automobile travel, plants could. Here's a thought...a little flatbed trailer for the garden.so that the truck bed could be used for what it is rightly meant for...sleeping. Would you like to adapt this idea to the advertising garden I just submitted?.....gfundl-- gfundl, Nov 19 2004 Once upon a time, I was involved with forest blockades in extremely remote areas. The difficulty in getting food supplies in and out, and a desire not to spread alien seeds and plant matter in virgin rainforest led us to consider this very idea - a covered greenhouse/ trailer growing high-yield, high nutrition crops.-- BunsenHoneydew, Dec 07 2004 Plus, owning land (in your truck) entitles you to vote. I like it.
Plastic bedliners a must.-- shapu, Dec 07 2004 random, halfbakery