Farming

Starting the garden

1. On the morning of Spring 2 a note from Dean Clary asks you to come to the Dean’s office, up the stairs from the Dorm Hall. Accept the job (“Campus Career”) and Clary meets you at the garden gate later that day.
2. At the garden, Clary:
   1. teaches you Song of Tilling and has you till a plot;
   2. shows you the Magic Well just past the entrance — drop harvested crops in and you’re paid overnight;
   3. gives you Basil Seeds×5 and asks for 3 Basil for the turtle in the office;
   4. teaches you Chant of the Woodcutters for dead trees, and tells you to clear weeds with a scythe.
3. Clary can’t find a watering can and suggests buying one in town, but nobody sells them. There’s an empty Watering Can by the garden shed: pick it up and fill it at the garden pond.
4. Basil takes three watered days. Bring 3 to Clary’s office (“Basil for a Turtle”) for Sunflower Seeds×6. Basil keeps producing every two days, so sell or keep the rest.

Farming tools

1. Your hoe, axe, pickaxe and shovel are enchanted: you never carry them. Play the right song and they fly out to do the work.
2. Fill the can at the garden pond — with the can equipped, walk up to the water and choose Fill. It’s the only place to refill, and it always fills to the top. Rain waters crops but doesn’t refill your can.

Tilling plots

1. Stand in the garden and play Song of Tilling (A S J on keyboard, ↓ ← A on controller). The garden is the only soil you can till.
2. Then:
   1. Mark plots by clicking the ground, or drag to mark several. The shape buttons switch between a single plot, a line or a circle.
   2. Line them up: hold Ctrl (Y on controller) to show snap points that align new plots with old ones.
   3. Choose the plot size: small plots for normal crops, large tree plots for saplings and the Colossal Pumpkin.
   4. Confirm: the enchanted hoe digs each plot. Anything it doesn’t finish today is dug overnight.
3. Each plot costs 35 mana (28 once the song is perfected). Click a marked plot again before confirming to unmark it and get the mana back. Your starting 350 mana is enough for 10 plots a day, or 12 with the perfected song.
4. Plots are permanent: after a harvest the soil stays tilled for the next seed, so you only pay once. The only limits are your mana and the size of the garden.
5. To remove a plot, play Song of Tilling and select it: the enchanted shovel turns it back into grass for 30 mana, returning the seed (and the crop, if it was ripe).

Planting, watering and harvesting

1. Plant by dragging a seed onto an empty plot, or equip the seeds and press interact (Space) beside it. Saplings and the Colossal Pumpkin need tree plots; everything else goes in small plots.
2. Water by equipping the can and interacting with the plot (or dragging the can onto it). Wet soil turns darker.
3. The growing rules:
   1. A crop grows one step each night after a day it was watered. The “days” of a crop are watered days: a 3-day crop planted and watered on Spring 4 is ready on the morning of Spring 7.
   2. Water on the day you plant. Freshly tilled soil isn’t wet enough by itself.
   3. Dry crops never die — growth just pauses until you water again.
   4. Seasons don’t matter to crops. Nothing withers when the season changes and any seed grows any time of year; seasons only change what the shops sell.
   5. Most crops are done after one harvest; regrowing crops stay planted and ripen again a few days later as long as you keep watering.
4. Some harvests give a seed back: Sunflower 75% of the time, Tulip and Snap Tater 50%, and Onion, Spring Tuber, Twilight Blossom and Wild Wheat 25%. The Seed Gatherer skill raises each chance by half again.

Rain and watering shortcuts

1. Rain waters every plot in the garden. The weather is the same every year, so you can plan around it: on these days it’s already raining when you wake up (in Winter it snows, which works the same way).

2. Your crops are also watered while you’re away on the Bellian Moor field trip (Summer 7).
3. Rain Dance. Linden teaches you Rain Dance (L ; L F J / Y B Y → A) when you cure Linden’s Gobbling Bluebells in “The Tool Thief”. Play it in the garden to place a rain cloud about 7 plots wide and 6 deep; it drifts with the wind for about 20 seconds, watering everything it passes. Placed upwind, one cast can water a strip of roughly 20 × 6 plots. It costs 40 mana (32 perfected); Raindancer makes the cloud 50% bigger and Wind Wielder doubles its speed.
4. Sprinkler plants. A Sprinkler Plant costs 120 Gold Petals from Kavita (any season) or at Mel and Lusina’s Shell. Plant it in any plot: whenever you water it, it sprays every plot within about three plots. If the spray reaches another sprinkler, that one fires too — a chain can water a whole field with a single splash. Sprinklers don’t grow, and you get them back if you dig them up.
5. Fountains. A garden Fountain waters the plot where its jet lands — a couple of plots to one side — every 10 seconds while you’re nearby. The schematic is 80 Gold Petals at Practical Practice and needs all three Carpentry skills; the Merfolk Fountain from the Seaflower Festival works the same and needs only one. Aim the jet at a sprinkler plant and it keeps the whole area watered while you’re around.
6. Potion of Hardiness. Pour it on a watered crop to keep it moist for longer (you learn it in Potions 101 on Spring 4). How long it lasts depends on quality: Poor 1 growth day (50% chance of a 2nd), Average 2, High 2 (50% chance of a 3rd), Exceptional 3, Legendary 3 (50% chance of a 4th). Harvesting ends the effect, so use it on slow crops halfway through.

Speeding up growth

1. Pour a growth item onto a crop (drag it, or equip it and interact). It doesn’t work on ripe crops or sprinkler plants.
2. Your options:
   1. Instagrow adds 1 growth step at Poor or Average quality, 2 at High or Exceptional and 3 at Legendary. Chrys teaches it in “Tea for Fern”; from Summer the Waterfall Grotto also sells it for 180 Gold Petals, but only at Average quality (one step).
   2. A Mud Pie adds 6 growth steps — enough to finish almost any crop at once. Chloe sells them at a stall in the Wisk park (about 5:30–18:00), and later at Amka’s treehouse. The first costs 200, the next 300 and every one after that 350.
   3. “Mud Pie Time”: on your third visit Chloe asks you to hand out 7 Mud Pies around town. Deliver them all and tell Chloe the truth, and a free pie arrives to your dorm every week, on days 2 and 9 of each season (uncollected pies pile up). Lie about it and you don’t get them.
   4. The Flower Farmer skill makes flower crops ripen a day sooner on their first harvest — Chamomile, Dandelion, Lavender, Moon Poppy, Pansy, Sunflower, Thistle, Tulip and Twilight Blossom. Regrowth isn’t faster.
3. Insta Ungrow does the opposite and shrinks a plant. You only need it to clear the overgrown Gondola in “The Beekeeper’s Bees”.

Pests

1. Every night, unripe crops have a small chance of being eaten — usually 2–6%. Kale and Sunflower are the most at risk (8%), then Basil, Beet, Carrot and Dread Sorrel (7%). Fruit trees, pond cranberries, the Colossal Pumpkin, Wild Wheat, Marjoram, Pansy and crops grown from shears-gathered seeds are never eaten.
2. An eaten crop dies: interact with it to clear the plot and replant. Ripe crops are safe, but regrowing crops are at risk again every night they’re regrowing, so a field of cucumbers will lose the odd plant all year.

Fruit trees

1. The only fruit tree you can buy is the Spundlewood Sapling: 235 Gold Petals from Kavita in Spring, or 470 at the Waterfall Grotto later. Plant it in a tree plot and water it daily for the first 6 days; after that it looks after itself.
2. It drops its first Spundle Bean 10 days after planting, then one every 4 days for the rest of the game. A Spundle Bean sells for 65, so the tree pays for itself in four harvests — or bake it into a Spundle Dessert, or pickle it.

Pond cranberries

1. The garden pond has nine spots for water seeds. Cranberry Seeds are the only ones you can buy: 20 Gold Petals each at Mel and Lusina’s Shell, south of town (a mermaid shop takes over the spot later and still sells them).
2. How to grow them:
   1. Clear each spot of dead water plants with the Scythe (3 Twigs each).
   2. Plant by equipping the seeds and interacting with a cleared spot.
   3. Wait 3 days — water plants grow on their own and never need watering.
   4. Harvest with the Scythe for 2 Cranberries and a 25% chance of a seed back (37.5% with Seed Gatherer). Replant straight away.
3. Two Cranberries sell for 100 from a 20-petal seed with no watering at all: nine spots make roughly 240 Gold Petals a day.

Bees and honey

1. Chamomile, Lavender, Marigold and Tulip attract bees. Each day one of these flowers sits ripe and unpicked, there’s a 15% chance a Honey Bee lands on it. Equip the Bug Catcher and interact with the flower to catch the bee instead of picking the flower.
2. With 4 Honey Bees and 10 Logs you can build a Beehive (schematic 150 Gold Petals at Practical Practice, two Carpentry skills). It makes one Honey at a time, faster the more bee flowers are ripe nearby, up to six: with six it takes under two days, with one about 11. Honey sells for 40.

Selling your harvest

1. Drop crops into the Magic Well by the garden gate; you’re paid overnight and the end-of-day summary splits the money by category. Every shop pays the same, so the well always gives you the same price as a merchant.
2. Most crops count as Gardening income, which the Farm Merchant skill boosts by 10% (added as a separate line).
3. Crops from wild seeds count as Foraging and don’t get that bonus: Dandelion, Dread Sorrel, Fiddlehead, Marjoram, Pansy, Thistle, Viperwort, Wild Blackberries, Wild Leeks and Winter Berry.
4. Most seeds sell back for half what you paid.

Farming skills

1. You spend skill points on the skill tree; a hexagon opens up once you’ve unlocked one next to it (see Ability tree).

The garden shed

1. The shed starts out locked. After the market day in “Clover’s Calamity”, Clover gives you a strange gem: use it on the secret passage in the dorm’s Common Room, which leads to the shed. Inside you meet the ghost Ivarice and start “Ghost Treasure”, and the front door unlocks.
2. Near the end of “Ghost Treasure”, Ivarice fixes the chimney for 1,000 Gold Petals and gives you a three-slot stove by the farm. The next morning Practical Practice starts selling shed upgrades through its Upgrades and Decorating brochure:

3. You pay for an upgrade every time you choose it — switching back to a wall style you used before costs again.