Gardening – you’re doing it wrong

I finally got my copy of Into the Future this week, and I was anxious to try it out. Many of my sims learn the gardening skill and spend a lot of time tending their gardens, and being able to finally place gardens indoors was one feature that I’ve been waiting for. But the first sim I sent to the future didn’t quite get how to harvest watermelons from a plant she found in Oasis Landing.

There must be a cloaking device installed that offsets the plant’s true location to non-sims.

Misc tip – finding mushrooms

Mixing elixirs sometimes requires various kinds of mushrooms that can be found throughout the world (as well as occasionally for purchase at Aleister’s Elixirs and Sundries).  Your first thought might be to try using the Collection Helper lifetime reward object to find them, but there isn’t a selection to find mushrooms with it.

Fear not, the mushrooms light up on the map along with the seeds selection in the collection helper.

Sims with enough gardening skill can plant and cultivate more of any mushroom that they find, but any sim can pick mushrooms in the wild like this one.

Misc tips – gardening like a boss

One of the lifetime aspirations is for sims to grow eight different types of plants to perfect quality.  There are the obvious steps to this, including leveling up the gardening skill, fertilizing the plants and starting plants from the higher-quality output of previously grown plants.  But there are a couple other steps that I have my sims take when they are building the perfect garden.

The first and most obvious tip is to leave some room between the plants as you place them in your garden.  Sims won’t walk through plants that are spaced directly next to each other, so plants that are in the middle of clumps like that might wilt and die from neglect.  It doesn’t seem to matter which plants are near each other, there just needs to be enough space for a sim to get in to tend the plants.

I always install sprinklers in my sims’ gardens, and I have the sim with the highest handiness skill upgrade them to auto-water sprinklers.  With the now automatic sprinklers, my gardening sim won’t have to water the plants when she goes out to tend the garden.  Place the sprinklers so that their 5x5 coverage area (which is shown when you’re placing it in buy mode) covers as much of the garden as possible.  The garden shown here is 10x10, so there are four sprinklers.  Besides watering the plants, the sprinklers can also provide some fun as sims play in the spaying water; don’t worry, though, they play carefully enough that they don’t stomp on any of the plants in the garden.

I also always build a fence around my garden and lock the gate to everyone but the sim’s family members.  This will keep the zombies out when they spawn next to the garden on the full moon.  Zombies like to eat harvestable plants whenever they can get to them, and the fence will block them.

Whichever sim is going on adventures should also take some time to harvest the plants that are specific to those locations and then give the produce to the gardener.  With a wider array of plant types, it’s easier to find eight different species to use for your sim’s target perfection count.  Also don’t forget to go to the Fall festival to get some pumpkin to add to your garden.

As your sim’s garden grows higher quality plants, put the surplus produce in the fridge so the chef in your family can use them to make higher quality meals that will keep your sims satisfied longer.

Finally, when your gardener isn’t actively tending the garden, have her learn the fishing skill.  Fish make excellent fertilizer.

Oh, and yes, the seed for the money tree also counts toward the eight different species of plants, so if you find that seed, use it.

Carven der punkin

Okay, so this image today isn’t really unexpected but rather just showing normal gameplay (therefore, I don’t really count this as a bonk image).  I have been a bit busy this week with finishing photo projects and meeting with clients so my sim play time has been a bit shorter than other weeks.  Anyway, because the real Spooky Day is two weeks from now, my sim is carving a pumpkin.

To make this a little more than just a “look at this” post, here are some quick tips regarding pumpkins:

• Send your sim to the Fall Festival to harvest pumpkins.  They are free from the pumpkin patch at the festival and your sim will usually harvest pumpkins from several plants if you just let her work at it.  You might find pumpkin seeds from random spawners around the town, but there are always pumpkin patches at the Fall Festival lots that were included in the standard sim towns (and during the other seasons, the grocery store sells pumpkins year-round).
• When your sim carves a pumpkin, she will retain the seeds which can then be planted by sims with gardening skills to grow and harvest more pumpkins.  This of course leads to increasing your sim’s gardening skills and higher quality fruit, which itself leads to higher quality seeds and if you keep planting and harvesting them, you’ll get perfect quality pumpkins in just a couple growing cycles.
• Watch out for troublemaking sims after you’ve put your carved pumpkins on your sim’s porch.  Sometimes you may find that your pumpkin has been smashed.
• As your sims carve more pumpkins, they will create higher quality carvings and unlock more types of carvings, in much the same way as making snowmen can unlock different types of snowmen that the sim can build.
• Finally, be sure to check out the cookbooks at the bookstore.  There are a couple recipes sims can learn that use pumpkins.  For sims whose favorite food is pumpkin pie, learning this recipe can be quite useful to get your sim’s hunger need satisfied quicker than with other food.