Gardening and Farming

This page is very much a work-in-progress and I would be grateful for any comments.

General

For players of previous Sims games - in Sims 3 you cannot hire a gardener. That said, it seems garden flowers and shrubs need no care. The produce plants need a great deal, and your Sim can build the skill by "doing the stuff", or do a course or read gardening books.

Gardening class can be taken at the Science Facility.

If you want to play "realistically", avoid the "special" seeds... these are the magical ones. They will certainly make your Sims rich but have nothing to do with real farming. You can sell the seeds instead of planting them.

Prerequisites

Green Thumb trait

Helps a lot, giving motive boosts for growing.

Loves the Outdoors and Eco-Friendly help too.

Super Green Thumb reward

This is given for a Skills challenge. The benefits of these two stack.

Complementary traits and skills

The Loves the Outdoors trait gives a boost for being out of doors.

The Eco-Friendly trait gives a boost for gardening, though your Sim may not be happy about driving a truck or tractor!

The Angler trait may well be useful for catching good fertilizer fish

Anglers should buy and read all the various fish books - listed under skills in the store - to learn the bait for different types of fish.

Natural Cook would work well with gardening\farming. Recipes are improved if made with excellent or better ingredients.

Handy Sims will find it easier to upgrade the sprinklers.

Seeds

Finding Seeds

Gardening class can be taken at the Science Facility.

When you reach level 1 of Gardening skill you are give some seeds. These are quality "normal". The seeds\fruit you buy at the supermarket are Very Nice, and it may be worth buying some for a better start. 

• Seeds for Watermelon, Garlic, Potato etc cannot be bought - but you can plant the items and they will act as seeds. or search for them in the neighbourhood.
• Mystery seed can come from exploring the catacombs, or from chests in World Adventures.
• Sims can find mystery seeds by rummaging in trashcans
• Mad Scientist Sims may occasionally bring home "leftover" items from experiments at work, including seeds and or deathflower
• Offspring of firemen (even grandchildren!) may have the ability to turn any fruit into a flame fruit
• Cheese, egg, steak, burger patty or omni cannot be found in this way; those come from Opportunities
• If you have awesomemod installed, Supreme Commander allows search for seeds to be macroed.

Seed Table

Plant Info Table

It appears that farming most of the WA plants gives inordinate amounts of experience, due to 500 exp per harvest and 2-5 harvests for most plants. Set against the travel expenses and time of going to find them, this seems reasonable.

Specific Plants

Flame Fruit

Having a flame fruit in your inventory can give your sim a happy  moodlet of +5

Ingredient in Angel Food Cake, which gives a larger warmth bonus

The flame fruit sprout is distinctive looking, it's the only ground-hugging plant of the four special seed plants.

Life Plant

Life Fruits will give your sim 1 day of life back if eaten.

They make excellent fertiliser.

It is a staked plant that wilts the moment it is planted. Move all wilt-upon-planting specials into a single row: all the stake plants in that row will be life fruit plants.

Death Plant

Move all wilt-upon planting special seed plants into one row. They will be Money tree and Plasma? Or Flame?

Staked plants from special seeds, which do NOT wilt upon planting, will be Death Plants

Revival also seems to have a 50% success rate, but only get the option to use it on Death Flowers.

If you have a Deathflower in your sims inventory when he/she meets with a serious accident, the Grim Reaper will take the flower instead of your sim, but NOT if it is due to old age. Basically it is a "Don´t die from accidents" free pass.

Also, you can only revive a dead plant, not a barren one. They look the same, but there is the subtle difference that one has a chance of flowering again if revived.

There are reports that SOME Sims who have the green thumb trait and has the super green thumb, can revive death plants over and over. This might be a bug.

Money Trees

You can tell the  money tree once it is growing because of the icon that shows up as it starts to grow. Once it becomes a sapling it looks very different from all other plants.

An orchard of money trees can bring in $10K in money bags and will drop seeds if there is enough space around the tree. Leave enough space around the tree if you want the seeds (1 clear tile all round)

The money tree sprout is very distinctive looking and starts to wilt the moment it's planted.

Money trees cannot be revived as they'll explode upon their death

The OMNI Plant

You get it by completing a challenge to grow 10 steaks of quality.

You can feed the omni plant any veggies, and fish you can find.

You can also feed it all books, with the exception of the magic scroll books that go poof when read.

You can't reproduce the ambrosia recipe this way.

The omni plant looks pretty weird with 4 swordfish growing on it.

Has special interactions - Feed and Check Diet.

Things you can feed it: 

• All fish
• All fruits
• All vegetables
• All books except recipes
• Rubber Ducks
• Mood Candles

Things you cannot feed it:

• Recipes
• Money bags
• Cars
• Bicycles
• Prepared food
• Stereos
• Paintings
• Seeds
• Rocks
• Birthday Cake
• Bubble Bath
• Death Flowers

The Process of Gardening

Watering

Sprinklers are essential if you are growing more than one or two plants.

They can be upgraded to automatic by a Sim with Tinkering level 4, and this is well worth while. Automatic sprinklers work from 4-7 am and use less water than leaving the sprinklers on all the time, affecting household bills.

Watermelons (and the Money Tree) show the effects of needing water differently than the other plants, though they will all show as 'wilting'.

Fertilizing

• There is a book about fertilizing. Gardening Vol 2: Odor Free Fertilizer - but this is simply a skill book.
• Use fish, fruit and vegetables to fertilize.This makes plants come to harvest faster.
• Fertilizer has no effect on harvestable quality because produce quality is far more important in game terms than quantity, unless you're selling produce for profit. Both skill and traits affect produce quality:
  • A low-skill Sim will get a Normal plant from planting a Normal seed, 
  • A high-skill Sim will get Nice. 
  • A level 10 gardener with the super green thumb perk can see plants which were Excellent or Great jump to Perfect.
  • This also depends on the plant level, too. It takes several rounds of steak planting to get a perfect plant, whereas low-level stuff like lettuce improves much faster.
• Weight of fish does not affect quality or days.
• All fertilizer does is speed growth to first harvest. It is unclear whether it speeds time to second, third, etc harvest.
• See the Plant Info Table for more information about fertilizers.

Life Fruit is the best thing you can fertilize with, though you might prefer to keep those for other uses. Lobster is great if you fish. I found Garlic and Steak are close.

Passing the Skill Journal Challenge Master Farmer adds an extra two days to the lasting time of any fertilizer.

Great, Excellent, and Outstanding quality all give an extra one day, Perfect gives two.

So a Perfect Life Fruit used as fertilizer by a Master Farmer yields 50 performance, and 10 days of fertilization.

Talking to plants raises the Sim's social motive, great for lonely farmers.

Replant to Improve Quality

When you plant an item of produce (eg an apple) you already know the quality of, the new plant will be one step better quality. E.g. Nice garlic, planted, gives a plant of Very Nice quality. 

Plants which die or go barren

Dead plants can occur after you neglect any plants under 'Wilting' condition for one day. After that, your sim will have to dispose or revive them. Dying and barren are two different states.  Barren plants have the same appearance as dead plants, but they cannot be revived. Each plant will become barren after it reaches its maximum amount of produce. The Green Thumb trait (not the reward) allows a Sim to revive a plant. So a Green Thumb Sim can get two Death Flowers.  Everyone else gets just one.

"Going barren" is unavoidable, and not reversible.  It's part of the game balance.  The idea is that you get a limited amount of produce from each planting cycle before you must go through the investment of planting and waiting through the initial growth.

Cleaning up dead plants

Telling a Sim to clean up dead plants is time consuming for a real farmer.  Each trip goes to the lot garbage can, and won't target small trash containers.  You could just delete them manually in Build mode; or use moveobjects on to place the bin closer to the growing plants.

Cooking Fruit and Veg

Usage of fruit and veggies from the fridge goes in alphabetical order.

Sims always use up the ingredient in the inventory first. So if you want to make 'Apple Cobbler,' take an apple from the fridge, put the apple in the cook's inventory and then do the cooking.

Sell Produce at a Supermarket

If the harvested produce is sold to a supermarket, it sells for at least 10% higher value than if sold via an inventory hole, depends on quality.

Sell Produce at a Consignment Store

Seeds for Selling - worth experimenting

Seeds you do not want can be sold to the Supermarket or in the inventory box.

From the Base Game on, there were rumours that if Sim collected a lot of seeds (maybe with the Collector or Supreme Commander) occasionally a seed might be worth a great deal of money. Sorting through Sim's inventory and checking prices may be helpful. There are reports of seeds worth up to §20,000. It's possible these are seeds that spawn close to the Science Building. I cannot confirm this, suspect it might have been a BG bug.

Seeds MAY also vary in price if left lying around on the ground.

To Sort Items in Inventory and Price them Easily

To examine a stack of seeds in inventory, click on the rounded blue triangle in the upper left corner of the inventory icon.  A new window will open in which you can examine each item in the stack individually. Items are always displayed in descending order of quality in this window. I plant the first few fruits, thus keeping to the highest quality available, and sell or stock the fridge with the rest.

Moving house

Without special mods, if your Sims move to a different house, the plants become untendable to them. They can harvest but not tend, weed or water and the plants do not seem to go barren. The new owners of the house can harvest but can only grow according to their own level of Gardening skill. Moving an unskilled Sim into a house with a mature garden is a quick way to help that Sim's gardening skill develop.

Alternatively, save a lot full of grown, perfect fruit/veggies/money trees and place it as a community lot. Sims in the Neighbourhood can go daily and harvest without having to do anything for it. This is particularly useful for Life Fruit.

Beekeeping

BUY Mrs. Stingley’s Beekeeping Box for $275

Beekeeping is an all-new hobby in Supernatural. As such, Sims need a new object for this hobby. With this special beekeeping box, Sims can raise a colony of honey bees and produce copious amounts of delicious sweet stuff—provided you put in a little effort. Should you not take good care of the bees, well, they let you know. They sting!

• The beekeeping box must be placed outside on a lot.
• The box produces honey, which can be used in Cooking.
• The happier the bees, the better quality.
• Any time you interact with the beekeeping box, you risk getting stung. However, happy bees rarely sting!

To make bees happy, regularly choose the Feed and Clean interactions on the beekeeping box.

Depending on the bees’ current state, you risk getting stung or attacked when attempting to clean.

But regular cleaning results in a lower chance of being attacked, so you can see how once you get over the hurdle, beekeeping can be smooth sailing.

Also feed bees regularly.

Both cleaning and feeding bees raise the mood of the bees, but like your Sims’ moods, over time the mood of the bees decays unless you attend to them.

Honey is produced every few hours.

When honey is ready, click on the box to Harvest.

Quality of Honey:

• Happy Bees: Perfect, Outstanding, Excellent, Great
• Content Bees: Normal, Nice, Very Nice
• Angry Bees: Bad, Horrifying, Putrid

To harvest the honey, it’s often a good idea to use the Smoke Out interaction to calm the bees. This seems like a win-win, but there are costs to regularly using Smoke Out before harvesting. This interaction reduces both hunger and mood, which can over time lower the quality of the honey or wax. So, keep an eye on the beekeeping box, gauge mood, and then make the best call to avoid getting stung!

Look for the motion of the bees outside the box to determine mood. If you see some buzzing bees just circling the box, they are happy. If you spot just a few bees buzzing peacefully around the box, the are currently content. If you see a swarm buzzing around the box and hear an aggressive buzzing sound, the bees are angry. And angry bees are likely to sting 75 percent of the time!

Credits

Information collected from

MATY, Sims 3 Wiki, Sims 3 guide, my own gameplay.