The fire bar thing was at a light orange and I put down, I think 5 or 6 seeds and the bar was almost red. If it takes that much room to plant stuff, how am I supposed to have a garden?
It's not how big the object is, but the total number of objects on the lot that determines the fire line. On a full lot, sell off any objects you don't need so you can plant more seeds. Decorations and landscape plants/trees are good candidates.
Why is it called "fire" bar?
It's something that was in the previous console versions of The Sims and Sims 2 games. Each console has only so much memory it can use, so the fire bar represents the amount of used/free memory available for the lot. It was called the fire bar because of the in-game explanation for it - something about it representing the increased fire danger due to the number of objects on the lot.
Flynn