Re: Favorite Fertilizer Option Please

@RonneeSimmer, on some of my Sims' gardens , I ignore the fertiler altogether!  It is so tedious and could be made much simpler.  I'm glad they simplfied Evolve for your plants, but I was surprized they didn't streamline the fertilzer system at the same time (in the patch right before Season was released).  

And while I'm not the biggest fan of TS3 , I did enjoy bug collecting!  (We do have it somewhat if you have the Outdoor Retreat GP).  But as a person who likes collecting myself, I always love Sims who like to collect as well, and it seems like a missed opportunity to not have a bug collection.  One of my favorite things from TS3 were collecting all the different colored fireflies! 🙂

@PugLove888 I agree... fertilizing is a pain. I have plenty of perfect plants that got there through care, bee hives, evolving as needed, and time. 

@Psychotps True... but the bees are a bit of a pain also, especially with large gardens and several hives. I'd rather deal with them than worrying about fertilizing, though, if I have an area and enough plants to make it a good plan. (Sometimes I only have 1-3 plants and they're in the living room or similar. Then I will fertilize instead... sometimes.) Mostly I don't worry about it because I have many perfect plants in my gallery. I just download them. Fair enough in my book, as I'm the one who went through the pain to mature them! 😉

@Psychotpsyes, I like having bees but sometimes I don't have room for them, or at least enough of them.  Or sometimes the bees are always enraged even if they don't have mites !  For those instances, I just prefer fertilizing by hand!  And sometimes, for a Sim that is really all about gardening, I will do both! 🙂

@SheriGR, yes, you put in all the work, so you should reap the benefits, pun intended! :eahigh_file: 

@Psychotps I didn't need gardens that large. I had a few homes with a lot of plants (including flowers) of various types that I was splicing/grafting, developing, and experimenting with gardening (herbalist/florist) and gourmet cooking fo retail store sales. I get bored if there are not a lot of challenges going on. That is where I got my perfect plants for my gallery... I was doing it a lot - and for a lot of sims years.

In these lots I had the gardens spread around - basically 2 main areas of the yard and two rooms indoors on one lot, and in a huge greenhouse on the other lot. The huge greenhouse only had 2 beehives - the other lot had 4 (yes, one in each indoor room/greenhouse). These gardens required a lot of maintenance - and the beehives can be a bit high maintenance, depending on several factors. (Particularly since their maintenance was peripheral on my radar. But that's me.)

Btw... I think both households ended up millionaires, so it wasn't for the money! I also found that since I didn't have time to 'babysit' the bee relationships that heavily, I ended up feeling I spent a fair amount of time dealing with them per the benefits. I didn't ever experiment with using them for romance or collecting, and I never got the honey quality above 'nice' I think. I liked having them, but they were also a hassle in my game play style.

You don't need a separate bee hive for each one. As long as you don't have walls and they're within 10 blocks, it'll work fine and still make them "Sheltered".

But if you have them further apart, then yea, you'll need more than one. I never saw a need to do it that way. It pays to keep them close by so I only have one bee hive to manage.

I've never needed anything bigger than what you see above. I just need some flowers for romancing, flower arranging, and laundry, foodstuffs like onions, mushrooms, carrots and such to make meals cheaper, and dragonfruit for the $$$.

The honey isn't a big deal. I just sell it most of the time but keep one batch on all my sims in the house just in case they get stuck outside in severe cold or heat. It's worth it though. The quality doesn't seem to make much difference.

@Psychotps I was playing large households, herbalist/florist /chef sims, and experimenting with the plants... and hoarding them a bit. (Do you think?). Yes, they all became very wealthy, made their wares to sell in stores, and I did 'supersell' a lot. Yes, I could have way geared it down and had less bee hives. Thew were part of my experiments at parts. And not my favorite part at that. Oh... and this greenhouse had partial 2nd-floor loft on each side with an herbalist lab on one end and science lab on the other.

@Psychotps, I don't even need the temperature protection, as i've never had a Sim die from temperature.  (Except the one where I was testing something for someone and I had my Sim die on purpose, but that is antoher matter, since eating honey would have messed up what I was trying to test!) 

I also don't use the bees that much to have them find collectables, unless the weather is really bad.  And I've never used them for romance since in real life this would put me in any mood but romantic! 😃 

For me I like the honey to cook with (in the bakery I downloaded from @SheriGR I added a hive because I had some honey from my Sim's home garden and wanted honey on had at the bakery  since the honey cake makes a nice profit! 🙂  )

I also like it as a source of emergency food and of course to sell.  But I use it mostly to negate bad moodlets... like if my Sim is embarassed or uncomfortable or sad.  But I usually end up using it to combat the effects of bee stings... and I have one family that gets stung a lot so I'm not sure if having honey just to fix the moodlet caused by bee stings is a really logical way of doing things! 😃

Also, some of my gardens were planted before Seasons so they arent' formatted in a way best to utilize bees.  I have a house I've played since Outdoor Retreat where the extensive garden encircles the house!   One bee box won't do the job!  I have other older gardens set up for the Gardne Gnomes Club to help out, and those have so many plants that there isn't even room for a bee box... I would have to get rid of some plants, and I don't want to do that! ☹️

I guess you can say I'm a bit of a plant hoarder myself! 😃

@Psychotps Yes, I realize the position of the hives could be maximized in a few spots, but I made judgement calls in the situation based on a number of things that I won't go into... bottom line is that the maximum use of the beehives was not my top priority. I do fully comprehend how to use them to their 'maximum effect', if I wanted to. 😉 My main point is that using less of them in any of these situations also did not work for reaching all of the areas to a reasonable extent. Sometimes if you centrally locate the box it will then not reach to the outer areas, so adding it closer to the end perimeters may not make maximum use of each box, but it will then reach to all parts. I hope I explained this correctly. Bottom line is the gardens were almost all larger than yours, which is why I used more beehives. They evolved well and I took excellent care of them. As I said, I had many perfect plants in the end and more than a million semolinas from the efforts. 🙂

@Psychotps Yes and no. You have to queue them up to 'supersell' by batches/areas. No, definitely one supersell is not enough. I think the super-sell perimeter may even be smaller than a behive coverage perimeter. I don't remember the exact span right now (I don't garden extensively now, I build mostly), but you can tell by which plants have fruits gone.

@Psychotps :eahigh_file: Yes! I love that idea! Maybe if we ever get a farming pack my huge greenhouses & gardens will make more sense... I'm hoping for that! Wouldn't that be a great idea... to have a harvesting machine that could then harvest those for you or 'super sell' as a batch?!

Once I found out that harvesting and keeping the produce in personal inventory started making for ginormous household bills (I had a ton of perfect dragon fruits, for example and spent well over a rl hour clearing them out of inventory one night - and was a millionaire afterward)... I had to make a new plan. What I do now is first have them harvest just the plants I want to keep the produce from (to sell in a retail store, for herbal brews, flower arranging, or to cook with), then I queue up 'super sell' commands for everything else by areas. Works pretty efficiently. I also move the 'to sell' produce to the Lice Cold Freezers at the retail store and the flowers to the flower-arranging tables (both of these items sync with each other on lot, like the refrigerators do). This way I don't have a bunch of produce and flowers in personal inventory that adds to household bills.

The sprinklers also save TONS of time if you upgrade them all to unbreakable and no puddles and space them carefully to cover everything. This can even be done inside a greenhouse by removing a wall panel, removing the floor to the plant area (leave at least one square around the 'sunken' area), then plant directly in the ground if you want. Place the sprinklers, then replace the wall panel in the greenhouse. Now your greenhouse will self water, yet will be fully sheltered for all seasons (that is what was done in this greenhouse - pic below). Patchy is also a lifesaver for maintaining a large garden, as is a butler and a gardener.  🙂

@SheriGRYea, that's pretty much what I do. I harvest what I need and sell everything else. The beehive handles fertilizing, the sprinklers handle watering, I just need to sell all or supersell each day.

I only end up harvesting once a week or so. I never use any of the rest. That's why I don't need such a huge garden. One of each plant is FAR more than enough for everyday use. The rest is just cash. If I want more money, I'll plant more dragonfruit. My two perfect dragonfruit plants net me over 5K a day.

Making a million isn't hard.  I could easily take my perfect dragonfruit and plant 20-30 more plants. In a few weeks, I'd have a million.  I don't play for the cash, Just the challenge of the jobs and stuff.

I'm currently working my way through the social media career, just got the goal to obtain 25 million followers... gonna take some work.

@Psychotps  😃 I love your reaction to @SheriGR 's garden pics! :eahigh_file:  I was waiting for your reaction because I knew how many plants some of her gardens have (both from pictures and from houses of hers that I have downloaded ) ! 

I should try the bees interaction for romantic pursuits, as I'm sure it is comical.  But in my book bees and romance don't mix, unless you are giving your beloved some candy or dessert with honey in it!.  But I just generally think of bees as painful! 

Sometimes I have Sims who keep doing things I don't want them to do, and I find a large garden can be useful for this. 😃

I do have some of my Sims keep honey  on hand for temperature emergencies, but I've stopped requireing all my Sims from carrying it since I've never had any cold or heat related near-deaths (the closest was when one of my Sims went outside briefly to take the garbage out and didn't have his cold wheather clothes on , and then Aliens abducted him and he kept getting colder and colder.  He had honey on him actually, but since he was in the spaceship, I couldn't access it! But he got home in time and went right inside his warm house and was fine! )

As for baking, I think the honey cake is actually under the Cooking interaction. 🤔  And even though some of my high Cooking skill Sims don't have much or any Baking skill, all of my high Baking skill Sims have high Cooking skill! 

It's not that @SheriGR  & I  need more plants, its that we want more plants! :eahigh_file: ❤️ We like our playing style, and you like yours; there is no wrong way!  🙂  I like how it looks to have a lot a plants and many of my Sims have the Loves the Outdoors trait.  While some of my gardens are small, many are not!   Garden produce is a form of collecting anyway, and like all collections, one doesn't actually need to have the collection in the first place, one just wants to have it for aethestics, accomplishment, and fun! 😉

@Psychotps, i've had that happen to me many times! 😠   I've taken to highlighting an hitting Ctrl + C for longer posts  quite often when posting, so if anything is lost most of it can be recovered.  (I've even pasted it in Word to be on the safe side).  😉

But now I'm curious as to what you were going to say! 

@Psychotps, thanks for replying.  I will try to do the romantic bees option the next time I have a single Sim who I want to have a relationship with someone. 

Yes, and fertilizing each plant, while tedious oftentimes, can be beneficial if you are trying to get a Sim out of your hair for a good amount of time so they don't cook food they don't need to, or drink a milion glasses of water and then pee themselves!  Or worse, set the house on fire!

i'm not sure but I think I've used honey cake before for a birthday.  I know you can use the hamburger cake or a zombie cake for birthdays.  So the next tiem your Sim has a birthday and you have some honey on hand, give it a try! 😉

Ambrosia! I usually have the skill but not the ingredients, or if I have the death flower I usually don't have the angelfish, but that might change now.  I've caught some angelfish in Sulani, and i've seen both angelfish and deathflowers at the ingedients stall in Casters Alley in the Rearlm of Magic!  And since regular Sims can still purchase these items, you can have them use them for Ambrosia instead of potions! 🙌

That is a sweet story about your Sim  and the ghost! ❤️

You wanted your Sim to be a photographer, but got sidetracked with music... I usually have plans for my Sims and I get sidetracked on Gardening! 😃