Thanks for putting together this fun challenge.
I started with a Sim, Rachel, with the following traits: loves outdoors, neat, loner, and quick learner. I had her aspiration be Renaissance Sim in order to gain the first five points of gardening faster. It provided a side benefit of learning other skills faster and getting some easy-to-satisfy wishes of getting a job or gaining a skill point for a skill she was already working on. She did eventually complete some of the steps of this aspiration, but stopped at "Reach level 3 of any career." If I were to do this challenge again, I think that the master chef aspiration might be a better choice, in order to gain more wishes for cooking.
The first thing that Rachel did was order a seed packet of fruit and plant an apple tree. She then proceeded to get through the first five levels of gardening as quickly as she could by reading about gardening from books. Every four hours I would also have her research gardening in order to increase her learning speed. I also had her go through the path to the Sylvan Glade in advance, so that her future trip there wouldn't waste her research moodlet. When she was a third of the way through level four and had just researched gardening, I sent her back to the Sylvan Glade so she could finish her skilling while waiting for the plants there to grow. She reached level five gardening, gathered a frog, completed a few simple whims, and fished for an hour or two while waiting for the snapdragons, lilies, and cherry trees to grow. She brought home a snapdragon, lily cutting, and cherry tree cutting. She planted the snapdragon right away, and grafted the lily to the apple tree once the apple tree reached adulthood. The lily cutting would be grafted to the snapdragon once it reached adulthood. After the pomegranate and orchid are grown to adulthood, the pomegranate is grafted to the orchid. It is important here to choose the faster growing plant as the grafting base, since this is what the growth rate is based on.
In order to speed up plant growth, I wanted Rachel to earn the Super Green Thumb reward as soon as she could. I decided that the best way to do this was by cooking. I had her cook normally until level 8, making dishes she had whims for or breakfast scrambles since they were fast. After this, she only cooked up to level ten if she had a whim to make a specific dish. Otherwise, she made caprese salads in order to gain whim points faster and level her gourmet cooking. She only spent points on moodlet solvers until she had saved up the 4000 satisfaction points for super green thumb. By the time she reached level ten in both cooking and gourmet cooking, she had enough satisfaction to buy a potion of youth and a few more moodlet solvers.
The only other necessary component for the ambrosia was angelfish. She was able to catch these at the closest fishing spot to her starting lot, Pebble Burrow. It only takes level four fishing to catch these, so she had one before long. From here on out, there was nothing left to do but wait for the plants to grow. She finished eating the ambrosia at 1:47 PM on Friday of the first week.
I learned a few things about gardening and growth rates from this challenge. I did a test before my actual file on whether fertilizer sped up time until the first harvest. I grew three apple trees side by side; one in a planter, one in a pot, and one directly in the ground. Time until the first harvest was the same for all of them. During the actual file Rachel did use planters and pots in an attempt to speed up growth rate, did a similar test with them afterwards found growth time to be the same again. I plan on running some further testing to see what happens if these are in different files.
I also found that the growth time for apple trees was a lot longer than expected. I was curious about how long it took, so ran another test file on this. This test did not use pots or fertilizer. Who would guess that it takes 80 hours for a Sim without super green thumb to grow an apple on an apple tree?
Yummy!
