More Awesome Than You!

Maybe I just haven't played the new EP enough yet or maybe this is an artifact of my having a custom neighborhood or maybe it's just that I'm dense but I haven't been able to figure out how to plant anything besides tomatoes in my garden plots.  What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

PS.  I don't mean trees, I have those, I mean seeds in the garden.

Gardening badges. At first you can only plant tomatoes, the other seeds gets unlocked as the sim who is planting them becomes more proficient and earns badges.

This page at snootysims will help you.

http://www.snootysims.com/infoindex.php?id=seasonsbadges

Except that you don't need a gold badge to plant eggplants. It is :
-no badge : tomatoes
-bronze badge : strawberries and cucumbers
-silver badge : pole beans, peppers and eggplants
-gold badge : option to talk to the plants

(I hate misinformations...)

Has anyone noted how long a plant retains its thriving status after being talked to?  I know the trees stay thriving until harvested, but not sure about the plants.

Am curious because it takes less time to talk a seedling into the thriving state than it does a full grown plant.

I hadn't noticed my trees retaining their thriving state, I'm pretty sure that I have to give them the odd pep talk to nudge them back up. The only gardening hack I use is the one to prevent endless watering/pruning of flowers/shrubs.

I got a actual farm with about 200 plant plots and for me plants and trees stay in thriving indefinitely unless they get weeds, overwatered or some other status to lower their rating.  I'm pretty sure i don't us a hack that changes this either.  If your plants go down from thriving status you probably aren't catching weeds or tending them fast enough.  Not sure on the exact value of time it takes to lower the ranking but its probably around 6+ sim hours.

I have no gardening hacks; the trees are tended when needed and I've not seen their level drop till harvested.  It doesn't really take long to get them back up thriving after the harvest.

Given what you've reported, LFox, then it makes a lot of sense to get the seedlings to thriving level as it takes less time.  Or at least it seems to.

I'm working on a farm run by Servos.  I have a good number of them in my game so I figured a Servo commune could supply the hood with organic goodies, or at least those families who don't have green thumbs. 

In Urban Paradise they are currently in a building/business boom as new sims from Uni are being incentivized with grants from my Alphabet family's sizable bank account to move to the 'hood. Igor, the family servo, made six other servos who bought the family's old plot of land (former Tower of Doom) and have built four huge greenhouses, along with a sizable lake. I have two servos on "Be fisherman" and four on "Be farmer". They have approximately 300 vegetable plots and 20 fruit trees. The four dedicated farmers are keeping up very well. I do use sprinklers, though, and all have gold badges.

I'd agree on the thriving decrease. Back when the family was living on crops only grown inside the house, if a weed popped right after they went to bed around midnight, the plant would still be thriving at 6 am. Couldn't wait much later. Of course, the faster you catch weeds the less likely they will spread, and thriving plants don't get weeds as much. I noticed that as long as I had someone talk a freshly planted plot up to thriving right away, I might have one outbreak of weeds the whole time.

Is it a speed issue, then, to keep the weeds from popping up?  I've got one Servo in silver and it seems to be taking forever to get her to gold.  Have been sending her out each time a weed pokes up; maybe I should just sit back and let the weeds cover the crops.

Well, that's one way to do it. You could also use JM's macrotastics to skillinate... gardening. You just have to accept ahead of time that one of your plants will be over-watered. But if you ask me, that's better than letting all of them get weeds.

Weeds don't "spread" specifically. Each plant is on its own timer for when weeds appear. But macro/Skill/Gardening will handle the tedious grinding for you.

It is extremely efficient.  I usually have my sim kids skillinate gardening when they've lerned everything else that's useful.  It usually doesn't take many hours to get a gold badge.