Gardening

[elpacksims]

Several gardening related questions:

• Has anyone gotten different varieties of seeds in seed packs?  I keep getting the same ones.
• I'm trying to get onions, tomatoes, and other things. I haven't had luck yet on various lots - if I have found them, I can't yet harvest.
• Has anyone noticed any fertilizers that work better than others?

[Devin]

1. As far as I know, they will always be the same for each seed packet, though the amount of seeds for a certain seed type might vary.
2. You have to remain on the lot for the amount of time necessary for the type of plant to mature. As far as I know it doesn't have to be all at once, but over time. Spend more time on those lots and you'll be able to harvest.
3. Sorry, don't know the answer to this one as I haven't done much testing with fertilizer.

[_Annika_]

Carl mentions in the guide that rare fish seem to work better than other fertilisers.

[elpacksims]

Thanks. I did read the guide - completely awesome and helpful. I'll be on the lookout for more as I play and others do as well. 
I think I like this game more than I think I did. 

[ClayMask]

If you get to a high enough gardening level to be able to graft plants, you can take clippings from plants at other lots well before you'll be able to harvest from them.  If you're also working on fishing and it has a good fishing spot, that's a good thing to do while you wait for the plants to grow.

[elpacksims]

If you get to a high enough gardening level to be able to graft plants, you can take clippings from plants at other lots well before you'll be able to harvest from them.  If you're also working on fishing and it has a good fishing spot, that's a good thing to do while you wait for the plants to grow.

Oh good to know. I can now graft and should be closer to the few I wasn't able to gather before.. I have been doing lots of fishing also since I started using that to fertilize.  Thanks!

[_Annika_]

I'm not sure if it's been fixed with the patch - I'm a little afraid to mess up my legacy so I'm waiting - but I just sold my sims' plants by mistake (they were meant to go into family inventory). When I hit undo, it completed her milestone to evolve 10 plants to excellent quality. Before that she had 8/10.

[Playalot]

@ _Annika_, I guess your game thought they were 8 new plants!? Quite a good exploit there but not so good for a legacy 

I still find that it takes forever to get a garden full of perfect plants and that's with using rare/expensive fish as fertilizer and queuing up several fertilizer action on one plant. If it wasn't for ambrosia I would just never garden in TS4. Unless I'm missing something totally obvious and doing it the hard way. <shrugs> 

[ClayMask]

@ _Annika_, I guess your game thought they were 8 new plants!? Quite a good exploit there but not so good for a legacy 

I still find that it takes forever to get a garden full of perfect plants and that's with using rare/expensive fish as fertilizer and queuing up several fertilizer action on one plant. If it wasn't for ambrosia I would just never garden in TS4. Unless I'm missing something totally obvious and doing it the hard way. <shrugs> 

For me, the easier way was to get just one or two perfect plants, and then grow additional copies of them from their fruit.  Then you can grow normal quality of the other ones and graft them on to the perfect plants.

[Playalot]

I guess I must be way too much of a control freak because I had my sim traveling all round the place to home with just one graft because I wanted to only have fruit grafted together and vegies etc. Because the cutting's name would disappear I couldn't tell what was in my sims inventory .... hence the 'one at a time' approach. It's driving me mad.

So, Claymask, what plants did you start out with to grow into perfect plants?

[_Annika_]

Playalot, I think I have a little of your OCD, because I've been doing exactly the same thing. Only tree fruits on fruit trees; only flowers on flower plants; onions, potatos and carrots all go together, because they grow in the ground; etc.
Claymask, I never thought of replanting the higher quality produce to get past that milstone, because the wording made me think that I had to evolve it all

[Playalot]

Thank goodness it's not just me! Only last night did I think about replanting the higher quality produce, but it still seems 'messy' to me. I just need to come up with a system that suits my OCD TS4 gardening tendencies and I'll be fine. 

By the way, I'm so with you on your grafting pairings. I accidentally grafted potatoes on my cherry tree... <delete> Yuk, messy gardening. 

[ClayMask]

My Sim only was gardening to have some things to cook with at first, so I started her off with a sage/wild strawberry/spinach/onion hybrid.  When it became mature I planted more of it, and grafted other plants on to it to make them perfect from the start.  If you wanted, you could start off with a fruit plant, a vegetable plant, and a flower plant, and just evolve these three.

You still do need to some evolving of plants beyond this for the aspiration, but you certainly don't need to go as far as evolving a whole bunch of plants all the way from normal to perfect.  I think my Sim just evolved ten plants she had planted once each, and then trimmed leaves from them and hybridized them on to the perfects.  If you're trying to level your gardening up quickly, you could evolve them all if you want.  It will use a lot more fertilizer, though. 

[Playalot]

Good advice, I think that I tried with way too many plants to begin with as that's all my sim had time to do. Out of all the new skills this is the one that I just can't get it the way I want it.  I think I'll go for the less-is-more approach next.

[lindsaysoderberg]

• Has anyone noticed any fertilizers that work better than others?

Honestly, I don't think it makes any difference what kind of fertilizer you use. I usually use low quality plants just to get rid of them, and my plants become ready to evolve just as quickly as the rest of them.

I could be wrong though.