By Charles Kidder
Anyone who has gardened for a while is confronted with the need for a proper vehicle to schlepp plants, mulch, garden debris, etc. Having personally used almost everything except for a minivan, let me share some insights on gardening vehicles.
You may well have noticed a lot of old “cute little trucks” still on the road. One hopes that they’ll last forever, because all manufacturers selling trucks in the U.S. have abandoned the compact truck market. Trucks have been super-sized, chromed-up, and made powerful enough to tow your house—and are almost as large. So what’s the home-gardener to do?
I don’t think that anybody is actually going to go out and buy a family sedan for gardening, but my Camry was the first car I pressed into service. One slight advantage to most sedans: you can fold the back seat down and get a level surface that you might not care too much about getting dirty. And larger plants can stand up in the foot wells. Assuming that you don’t fold those seats down, that is.
Moving on to a more realistic solution, SUVs can serve pretty well for gardening purposes. Put all the seats down, and you have a lot of room for perennials and annuals. Or you can even lay smaller trees and shrubs down on their sides and put them in the cargo area.
It may not look very macho, but a minivan can haul a lot of plants, especially if you wrestle the seats out. One advantage to all of the above vehicles: your plants are enclosed, so there’s no need to throw a tarp over them to prevent the wind from tearing them to pieces.
But when you get down to it, sooner or later most gardeners want a truck, and finding the right one can be tricky. My first truck was a Ford F-150 purchased in the late nineties. (Please note: I’m mentioning brands only to provide information, not as any kind of endorsement.) This was a second vehicle, so it didn’t have to serve as my grocery-getter in crowded parking lots. Since I was then working as a gardener, I wanted plenty of room for tools and mulch, so I ordered the long eight-foot bed. The truck only had a standard cab, however, so no room for people or large stuff behind the seats. (You could sneak a small tool like a chain saw back there.) My truck was merely long, not gargantuan, and it did its job well.
Skip to several years later. I was no longer in the gardening biz, and the Ford truck had gone by the wayside. But as an active home gardener, I was again feeling the need for a truck. I didn’t want anything big or expensive, so this time I opted for a 2007 Toyota Tacoma. Only about as long and wide as a Camry or an Accord, so no worries about parking. Once again, just a standard cab, and only a six-foot bed behind. It could haul a lot of yard debris and about a yard and a half of mulch. One slight drawback: the four-cylinder engine did not have a lot of punch when you were loaded up. After five years and only about 16,000 miles, I traded in my Toyota creampuff, for reasons that are not now abundantly clear even to me. And sure enough, soon I was missing having a truck in my arsenal. Isn’t hindsight wonderful?
So the search for a gardener’s truck began again. New trucks don’t come cheap, so we started looking for a used one. Our constraints made the process difficult, however. We have no need to haul more than two people in a truck, so any kind of extra cab was potentially a waste. Crew cabs with four full-sized doors steal valuable space from the bed area. Extended cabs let you keep the six-foot cargo bed, but add jump seats that convert to an enclosed cargo area. Possibly useful at times, but it adds length. Although we ideally wanted to restrict our search to regular cabs, broadening our scope to extended cabs gave us a lot more to look at.
We initially looked only for Toyotas, but later added the Ford Ranger to give us more options. Looking over a large radius, we did find what appeared to be a lot of trucks that met our criteria. But then the grim reality of the situation began to sink in. Toyota trucks have a great reputation for reliability, so older ones still command a high price. Spending $7,000 to $12,000 for a truck with about a hundred thousand miles seems like a lot of money for a vehicle when you really have no idea how the prior owner(s) took care of it. Then again, you can go to a “respectable” new car dealer who proceeds to show you a truck that still has a big dent in the door and reeks of cigarette smoke. And supposedly somebody wants to buy it As-Is, so they’re not going to deal(?!)
So, we took a look at a junker truck, a 1997 Tacoma with over 200,000 miles, but listing for only $2,999. Looked good for its age, and the “nice young man” owner had recently replaced the clutch. Still, what’s going to happen next? Expensive repairs could be just around the corner. If you want to give yourself something else to worry about, older vehicles don’t have all the safety features of newer models. Sure, you might not be driving it a lot, but who wants to gamble on your next accident. Ultimately, we swallowed hard and bought a new truck, under full warranty and with all the latest safety gizmos.
So, if you already own an old compact truck and know its repair history, it may make sense to hang on to it forever. And perhaps the rest of us should start a letter-writing campaign to manufacturers, pleading for the return of the sensible Gardener’s Truck. A Martha Stewart Edition, perhaps?
