Very true Carl, you may not always want to use this feature, especially in the beginning when you don't have a lot of everything. There are certainly times when I would want to control what fertilizer is used.
I often start out gardening and then when I have a nice garden with perfect plants I concentrate on other things. But I don't want to ignore that nice garden and then the micromanagement of clicking every plant EVERY DAY and scrolling through that long list of stuff to find the fertilizer you want is driving me NUTS!! Akh!
I love, love, love this feature and it's totally worth wasting some life fruits to me.
But I'd still be interested in seeing the stuff from your plant and fertilizer guide in table format like you mentioned. The game only rates fertilizer strength in general categories like Nice, Great, Outstanding.
For example life fruit, garlic and minnow are all labeled Outstanding fertilizers.