Hey everybody! I recently shared a couple of guides on my simblr and over at modthesims with information I created using Carl's Guides so I wanted to be sure to share them here too!
I have been playing my current family as a "living off the land" type family that only makes money through fishing and gardening with gardening being the predominant source of income. There are several sites with guides on how long they take to grow, if they're rare or not, and which plants you need to graft together to get some special breeds. I've been using Carl's Guides he has here though. It's the most in-depth one I've seen so far. I have made an extra reference guide to use in addition to that one. On his he shows the base value of the plants and the amount of hours it takes for them to be fully grown and harvestable.
This sheet that I've put together is to determine which plants give you the maximum amount of money.
The method: 168 hours in a week divided by the amount of hours needed to grow and then multiplied by 10 because you can get up to 10 harvestable items at a time (10 items of the same breed when it has not had another item grafted onto it). That number you get is the amount of items you can harvest in a week. From there I just multiplied it by its base value.
For example, Grapes take 48 hours to grow which means you could harvest a full grape plant 3.5 times per week. You get 10 items when fully grown so you can get 35 items per week. 35 items at $33 each is $1155.
The flaws/other considerations: The prices vary according to skill and quality. Like the Pomegranate is listed as $18 by Carl Sims, $4 by Sims VIP, and in my game I currently have some at $9 (and now I've even gotten it up to $25). How high your skill level is, how well you tend to your garden, how well you fertilize and what you fertilize with, and how many times you've evolved your plant are all factors that contribute to the price set for your harvested goods. Also, if you harvest the plants too soon you won't get all 10 items. (When I'm not sure I have my sim harvest just one plant, check in my inventory how many they got, and then go from there.) So, this isn't exact by any means. It is good enough though, I believe, to at least accurately represent which crops are going to give you the highest pay out. Keep in mind too these numbers are only for one plant. So if you have a plant that could make $700 in a week and you have 5 of them you could make around $3500 in a week just from gardening those 5 plants.
These are listed from highest to lowest. I've only put them in multiple images because that's all I could screenshot at one time. There's no other reason for them to be broken up.
The fruits/veggies I've listed above and their prices are specifically for the ones you harvest and then sell through your sims inventory. When you sell straight from your inventory it is counted towards that individual sims earnings. This is helpful for the Wealth aspiration as you're required to earn a certain amount of money. That's why I focused on selling things from your inventory. However, you can make a lot of money from the bonsai bushes and cowplants if you go into build/buy mode and sell them that way which adds money to your account but not to your sims earnings.
Once your bonsai berry bush reaches the Excellent state wait and make sure you harvest berries from it first, then you can click on it and convert it to "Decorative Bonsai" for $25 then go to build/buy and sell it there for $425 (a profit of $400). For the cowplant berry, there's nothing to harvest so you'll need to make sure you graft a dragonfruit plant and a snapdragon fruit so that you can keep harvesting cowplant berries from there. Once you plant the cowplant berry it takes a couple of days to turn into a full Cowplant. Once it's fully grown you can sell it in Build/Buy mode for $475. So, in terms of just straight up adding cash to your bank account these two will definitely help boost your numbers quickly. Just keep in mind that if you are doing the Wealth aspiration (mine is since she finished her gardening aspiration) it will not help you reach your goals for that aspiration.
And just as an example as to how lucrative gardening can actually be, here is a screenshot from my game from my "living off the land" family. This is a kind of old shot by now and their bank account is in the $600,000s now with money only coming from gardening (on long lifespan)!
They had 20 dragonfruit plants, 20 blackberry plants, and 10 bonsai bushes and no cheating for money whatsoever. In the screenshot you can see I'm dragging the dragonfruits over to be sold. There are 222 dragonfruit and the amount of money I'm about to get is $38,047.
And in this shot I'm selling 273 blackberries for $32,987.
Hope this is helpful for you! If you have any questions just let me know!
