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01/31/12 - Chapters 19-22 of Pam's Dreamweaver DecaDynasty Story are Here!
| Athletic | Charisma | Collecting | Cooking | Fishing | Gardening | Guitar |
| Handiness | Instruments | Inventing | Logic | Martial Arts | Mixology | Nectar Making |
| Painting | Photography | Riding | Sculpting | Writing | ||
The Sims 3 Gardening Skill Guide
Learn About Gardening as a Career: Money Trees, Plants, and Tending
| Gardening | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Garden | Find Seeds | Sprinklers | Fertilizer |
| Plant Quality | Plant List | Special Opportunities - Omni Plant, Steaks, and more | |
Special Updates for Late Night, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii
This guide has been updated to support Late Night and the Console versions of The Sims 3. To find out about the new Plasma Fruit, head to the Plant List. To learn about finding special seeds for life fruit or money trees in Moonlight bay, head to the Finding Seeds page. Also, the new guide to Sunset Valley has a map of special seed (and pink diamond, palladium) spawn points!
This Sims 3 Gardening Guide will help newbies by providing a walkthrough for how to get started and learn gardening in the Sims 3 and its expansion, World Adventures. Information is provided for all aspects of this skill. I'll show you how to grow perfect plants, by evolving your plants' quality over several generations. I also provide a full plant list for the Sims 3, which can be useful for gardeners by helping them in finding the rare types they've never grown.
The Sims 3's World Adventures expansion pack brings some exciting additions to the gardening skill. There are now ten more plants that can be grown, and a new way to use fruit. Nectar making goes amazingly well with gardening. You can turn fruit into Nectar, which will age and grow in value over time. Read up on the Nectar Making skill to learn more. Of course the guide has now been updated to show the locations of the new plants along with their rarities and growth times.
I'll try to provide all the secrets I've learned about gardening to help your Sims make the most money and get the best plants from your crop. Tips for the importance of sprinklers and how they can help to save time, upgrading sprinklers with auto-water and general guidelines for how to lay out your gardens are also provided.
Your Sim doesn't have to be a large-scale gardener to enjoy the benefits of the Gardening skill. Most Sims will want to someday grow and fish the ingredients for ambrosia. You can easily make a crop of only life plants. Fishermen will also appreciate a nice apple tree in the front yard. Packing an apple for lunch on a marathon day of fishing is a great idea. Used with the steel bladder lifetime reward, one little apple can really go a long way to helping your Sim stay out at the lake longer.
I am striving to learn everything I can about this helpful and profitable Sims 3 skill. The guide has been updated over a dozen times so far, and has slowly evolved into an all-inclusive resource for gardening. I've been incredibly lucky to have readers submit tips through our Sims 3 forum, ask questions and deliver feedback to help me improve it. This is the first guide, of the four hundred or so articles about gaming I've written that I've nurtured and grown to this degree, so I hope I can someday bring it to a level of perfection that rivals my Sim's garden!
Gardening Self Employment
With The Sims 3: Ambitions installed, gardeners can register self employed at the city hall after learning the first level of Gardening. Promotions depend on the amount earned gardening, and come with bonuses and the occasional trophy. Here's the breakdown:
| Rank Name | Earnings Req. | Bonus | |
| Cucumber Smasher | 30 | - | |
| Dirt Digger | 375 | - | |
| Clodhopper | 500 | - | |
| Master Weeder | 1000 | - | |
| Fertilizer Flinger | 2500 | 500 | |
| Bushwhacker | 7500 | - | |
| Seed Sower | 15000 | 1500 | |
| Famed Farmer | 30,000 | - | |
| Progeny of the Harvest | 60,000 | 2500 | |
| Agricultural Mastermind | - | 5000 | |
Gardening Cheats
There are no cheats in the Sims 3 specific to gardening, but there are some that can be useful to you. First, you can cheat to raise the gardening skill by making your Sim never fatigue, you can then read skill books. See my guide to raising skills by cheating. There, you'll find information on maximizing mood and needs. Additionally, you can cheat to get any plant in the game. Press Control + Shift + C to open the cheat console, and type testingcheatsenabled true then buydebug. Now enter buy mode and go to sort by function. Click the ? and find the plants section. You can plant any type of fruit, vegetable, or special variety in the game. Harvest just one and you can have your gardener plant them to produce more.
Can You Make Good Money Gardening in the Sims 3?
It takes a bit more work on your part to make money as a gardener than some other methods, but it's very rewarding gameplay and simoleon-wise. Gardening is just behind painting for my favorite way to be self employed in the game. You can use some of your harvest to help with the cooking skill, while the rest can be sold to the supermarket or used with Nectar Making.
To boost your Sim's money-making capacity from gardening, consider working toward making your entire garden perfect. You see, Sims can only spend so long gardening each day before they're exhausted or otherwise interrupted. You want your Sim to spend their time tending better quality plants.
Also keep in mind that it really isn't worth the time spent by your Sim or the resources consumed by fertilizing low cash-crops like lettuce and even death flowers. Why? Well, you will likely take a loss. Gardening can't blossom as a money-maker if you're fertilizing your Sim's tomatoes with all those Vampire Fish you've caught. Use something cheaper, like garlic for these plants. After all, with green thumb, super green thumb, all gardening challenges completed, and level 10 in the gardening skill, your Sim will be pushing plants very close to, if not always perfect anyway. Save the good stuff like perfect life fruit and vampire fish for your money trees and other high value crops!
The Best Plants to grow featuring Money Trees
Eventually the gardener's ultimate wish should be for a crop of Money Trees, Life Fruit plants, Flame Fruit and perhaps fruits for use with Nectar Making. Money trees are the best money makers of all the plants, and life fruit is used as an excellent fertilizer, sells at a decent rate, and is used in the ambrosia cooking recipe. Likewise, Flame Fruit is used in Angel Food Cake, which gives a nice moodlet.
In short, gardening is a great skill, and becomes even more useful to Sims with Nectar Making from the World Adventures expansion pack. It is easily one of my favorite skills in The Sims 3 because of its depth and complexity.
To learn more about the entire process of Gardening in The Sims 3, and how it can be used to make money, Click here.
| Gardening | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Garden | Find Seeds | Sprinklers | Fertilizer |
| Plant Quality | Plant List | Special Opportunities - Omni Plant, Steaks, and more | |
| Athletic | Charisma | Collecting | Cooking | Fishing | Gardening | Guitar |
| Handiness | Instruments | Inventing | Logic | Martial Arts | Mixology | Nectar Making |
| Painting | Photography | Riding | Sculpting | Writing | ||