Fertilizing gardens and creating them

[Janna]

I'm not really sure where this goes or if I should have asked seperately.  I can redo and separate if have to.



Fertilizing the garden:  when I was creating my gardens I would use fertilizer on all plants, from a to z, doing ones such as tomatoes which normally I wouldn't do.

Some of the plants, not all, would jump ahead, go from normal to very nice instead of nice, a few, not many would go to great skipping the nice and very nice.  Later on, at the next fertilizing, again some jumped ahead, from very nice to excellant, skipping the great.

I had thought the strength of the fertilizer, but it varied at what was more at the top of the choices, a tomato may get outstanding and a flame fruit would get the very nice.  I was 't paying attention to that.

Could that be a factor? Could someone who likes to do gardening answer this for me?  I don't know if I will every build a garden again from scratch, but still would like to know if possilbe, just in case, and it could help others.

2) is this more of a building question ?   
When I move a garden from one spot to another, the spawners will double on me.  In the pond instead of one box of deathfish, there was two, this happens to all of the spawners when I move them. 
Is there a reason, can I keep it from doing that?   

[simone23]

Are you using the composter object from the Stone's Throw Greenhouse?  That's the only thing I can think of with gardening that would generate spawners, but I didn't think it generated fish spawners.  If you have an Alchemist's bench on the property, that will generate spawners, again, didn't think it would create fish, but it's a happy coincidence if it did.

On planting and fertilizer, there are two stages to move up from the quality value on the planted item to the quality value of the harvested item.  When you plant a fruit that is, for example, normal, if the gardener has the Super Green Thumb LTR and if the gardener has either the Green Thumb or the Gatherer traits that will improve the quality of the plant itself (my gardener with all three can plant a Normal quality fruit and get an Excellent quality plant from it).  But not all Excellent plants are the same - think of the quality labels as buckets, not as values in and of themselves.  When the plant is fertilized, a point value for the quality of the fertilizer is added to the point value for the quality of the plant, and the resulting value places the harvestable into a new bucket.  If the plant was just barely in the Excellent bracket, the fertilizer might bring the harvestables up to a solid Outstanding.  If it was a high Excellent, the fertilizer might get the at least one of the harvestables to Perfect.

Also, when you have a Perfect garden, it's still worth it to fertilize (especially if you're using the composter which can fertilize - and weed! - an entire garden with only three harvestables - just buy a stack of peppers from the grocery to use for compost and keep your valuable life fruits and garlic for eating and selling) because the fertilizer not only increases the quality of the harvestables, it also increases the yield of each plant, so you're getting three or even four fruits per plant instead of two.

Hope this helps!

[Wai]

I can't help with the spawners, however, I have noticed that some types of plants take longer to improve from normal to perfect than others.  This is very noticable if you use the gardening station to "talk to" and fertilise your plants.  Lime is particularly hard to improve.

[Janna]

 always forget to clarify, you'd think I would have learned.  The spawners are from the cheat buydebug.  I use it to create the gardens I have and are building.  If interested you can see what is up on the showboat in building or download it (or not) in the swap shop. 

Hadn't considered the aspects of plants growing faster than others, but would that have an affect on jumping over a level?  I plant, fertalize, then do the bloom, replant and continue to bloom and replant until I have perfect fruit/veggies, fertalizing when it is needed.  I have always done the last fertalization with outstanding, but the leaps happen before that.  I put up sprinklers as soon as I plant, then start fertalizing. 
Puzzling for me.  Don't really care for gardening, prefer to just go to park and collect.  Of course, it is always (in my games) a park that I created, so I get to harvest the products of my sims labor.     

[Vinyl]

Janna, if you're using bloom sometimes it will set a plant's quality down a peg or two.  That would definitely explain why some of your plants aren't increasing in quality as fast as they should.  I know I've gotten several bad quality plants out of normal plants due to bloom malfunctions!