Gardening Guide

See also: Gardening and Seeds

Basics

There are 3 things that are required in order to have a successful garden: seeds, soil, and tending. Each bed can take 1 seed and 1 soil. A Deluxe Garden Patch with 8 beds will therefore hold up to 8 seeds and 8 soils. There are many different types of seeds, just ask a local botanist. Most of these seeds are not very useful since the plants are easy enough to gather by a botanist. Gardening should therefore be used to crossbreed for seeds that are rare to find or even impossible to obtain otherwise.

The next important component of gardening is the soil. There exists three different types of soils, each with 3 different grades. The higher the grade, the more potent their effects. If you can gather or afford Grade 3 soils, then there is absolutely no reason to use Grades 1 or 2 of any soil type. The first and most useful type of soil is the Thanalan Topsoil. Thanalan Topsoil promotes crossbreeding and will be used 99 percent of the time. The second type is the Shroud Topsoil, which is used to increase garden yield. It is inferior to the Thanalan Top Soil. The final soil type is the La Noscean Topsoil. It is used to increase the likelihood of obtaining high-quality yields, currently it is not very useful. Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil is the most important and most used. It can be obtained in Western Thanalan (x18,y27), at 5 am Eorzea Time. Note that Grade 3 soils of any type can only be gathered by a miner with a at least 370 gathering.

A successful garden also requires tending from time to time. An untended garden will lose its crops. Crops need to be tended at least once a day to ensure that they are doing well. While tending, you should also fertilize them. While the mechanics of fertilization have yet to be fully understood, it is believed that each time a crop is fertilized, the time it takes to grow is reduced by 1 hour. Fishmeal is quite cheap, don't be afraid to fertilize often.