bu Greymount Gardening Association
Is Gardening For You? Do you like dirt? Can you handle manual labor? Are you somewhat active? If so, gardening may be for you. Gardening is a life rewarding hobby or job as the vegetables from your garden can be eaten by the family or sold for extra or even the sole income. Gardening is time consuming; it can take an average of four to six hours daily of manual labor and requires the gardener to remember many details. However, it can bond the family as everyone, even children can care for a plot of vegetables. It’s easy if you are the Sim for it.
Planning Your Garden: Once you’ve decided if gardening is for you, access the building catalog. In the plants section there is a little brown patch of dirt, order one patch for every seed you plan to plant. When the dirt arrives place it somewhere outside or if you have an indoor garden, inside. Every seed in your packet requires its own little plot of land so make sure you order plenty of dirt if you're planning on reaping major profits from your garden. Garden Layout Tip: Put the plots in rows of about five plots and leave a row of empty plots free. This keeps a free row for the gardener to knell in and easy access to the plots without trampling the other vegetables.
Buying Seeds: So you want to plant a garden and you have the soil prepared. Then what you need to do next is buy the seeds. Go to your local seed and produce store, browse through the racks of seeds and buy some once you've decided on a vegetable to sell or eat. Buying one pack of seeds gives you five units of seeds, so unless you're a full-time farmer with huge plots of land, you should only need a few packs or less, especially to start with. Hint: Tomato and Bean seeds are worth their weight in gold, for one seed can produce multiple crops as they grow from the vine or stalk however, carrot and lettuce plots must be replanted after each harvest.
Plant Tonic: While you're at your local store, talk to the farmer and buy some of his Plant Tonic for a small price. Although it can boost your crops' sizes through the roof, it can also... well never mind.
Pests: The problem with gardens is that little bunnies and gophers running around SimCity love to eat your fresh vegetables. You'll want to invest in a guard. Head over to a pet shop and buy a cat (or adopt a stray). Cats are excellent pest hunters once you train their hunting skill. Also, you can buy a scarecrow or windmill in the standard catalog to help even more if a pet is not an option. Another option is the new state-of-the-art indoor garden. Just plant your soil for the garden and have a contractor enclose the garden with walls.
Planting & Maintenance: You have the seeds, you have the land, now you’re ready to get dirty. Plant your seeds and be prepared to spend 15 minutes of planting for each plot of land. After that's done, water the plot, watering will take about 6 minutes for each plot of land. If you’re forgetful, buy or adopt a dog; they can be trained to water the garden for you or have a child water the garden-it is the perfect before or after school chore. After a few days, the plots may be full of weeds, weed the garden and water the plots, weeding takes about 20 minutes per plot of land. It is vital that you water the plots each day and that you weed whenever necessary, or else your beautiful plants will die.
Harvesting: Ahh, victory. Soon your plants will be ready for harvesting, but you can keep watering them anyway to try to make them a bit bigger (this also leaves the risk of pests having an extra day to invade your garden). Once you've decided to harvest them, your plots of land will be emptied, enabling you to replant some seeds, or in the case of tomato and bean crops-water them and prepare for another harvest. After that, you have two options. You can keep the crops by ordering a pantry from the standard catalog. It works a little like a fridge, but you can keep your harvested food here for eating whenever you need to. You could also sell the crops by heading to a market and selling your whole harvest.
Currently the Greymount Gardening Association (GGA) is comprised of residents who have gardens or who are interested in gardening, but lack the time or resource. If you are interested in joining the association, contact the GAA with the subject line: Join the GGA. The GGA’s Consitution states that you must have a garden and you do not have to live in Greymount. Members are eligible to submit articles about gardening to Greymount’s website.
Some of the tips in the lecture series was taken from pyrofalkon’s strategy guide: http://www.geocities.com/pyrofalkon/sims/guide.htm
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