Gardening - can plant quality be cheated?

I haven't found a way to cheat it. But you can save a lot or room with mature plants. So that is one kind of way to cheat up plants.

Also, having Bees (place in the center they will fertilize 5 squares) that are healthy and calm will help your plants mature faster. And waking up Patchy will aid in doing gardening.

One way to get them to better quality faster: If you have a Sim with a Gardening skill 2 and up, turn on testingcheats and you can get the plant to be ready to evolve. That'll speed up the evolution process.
I don't think there's a way to directly change the quality of the plants though.

I know of no way to cheat that, but there are ways to get at what you want without cheating that are faster:

If you have city living, wait for the spice festival, there are plants that spawn there with perfect quality, you can take some fruits there. usually you'll find strawberries, sage, parsley and a few others out of season. there is a dragonfruit plant there as well. if that spice festival comes later in the year, that dragonfruit with fruits on them would be a perfect money maker in a sheltered place where you can plant lots of them and make a boat load of §§§.

you can create your own dragon fruits by planting those perfect quality strawberries first and then grafting snapdragons on to them later.

You can also start fishing for medium or large fish, typically you can find a number of salmon on any typical day in the willow creek river behind bargain bend, singleton streamlet and cabana crick, that is if you are there fishing all day, you don't need any specific bait.

if you got level 10 gardening, get some rare seed packets and grow glowfruit, iti will take a while but when you have a few of them, you can harvest them and simply use them as a reliable fertilizer.

It isn't particulary difficult to get the quality up, but yes, it does take some time. altneratively there should be some creators on the gallery who also have these things, you can download one of theirs, take what you need for your own place and delete their creation afterwards.

I found super fertiliser in the debug menu? I think it’s from the secret recipe the hermit gives you in outdoor retreat? I started using that on console as we have no gallery :( I know people save rooms with perfect plants, all the paintings etc..

Also I’ve noticed if you have multiple sims in your household, you can get them to tend garden whilst your off on a seperate lot. When you return the plants are nearly always ready to evolve.

Several Simmers have perfect garden rooms on the Gallery to download which would be the absolute fastest way. As @Hoverael shared, plants available at the Spice Festival and Romance Festival are supposed to be perfect. They even say they are perfect. But, it's been my experience once your Sim harvests them, they change to normal in their inventory. Perhaps it's a glitch only in my game, but it's been that way for a long, long time and I don't use CC or Mods.

Bees will help your plants evolve on their own if you keep them happy and your Sim can also send them to fertilize close-by plants in your garden. Buying seeds and picking Patchy's pockets for seeds is another way to get rare plants. Or you could graft to get rare plants, but that takes a long, long, LONG time, so it's not the fastest way.

The best fish for fertilizer is sturgeon, tuna, treefish and salmon. But the very best fertilizer is Growfruit. You can buy growfruit at the Ranger Station in Granite Falls if you have Outdoor Retreat. It's the fastest and cheapest way to get it rather than taking your chances with seed packets. Your Sim can fish up Cowberries and Dragonfruit reliably at the fishing spot on the pier in Magnolia Promenade. Again, it's the fastest, most cost effective and easiest way to get those two plants in my opinion.

I've also found that using expensive plants are excellent fertilizer as well, in particular; Bird of Paradise, Lilies and Roses. Anything worth over 15-20 simoleons or more makes my plants ready to evolve almost immediately.

Sage plants grow year round so they are the most desirable plant to grow for grafting. I'd plant a few of them right away as soon as you find them. Hint: It grows in Oasis Springs park. Have your Sim camp out in the park a day or two to give them time to grow. Initial growth shouldn't take any longer than that. I believe they can be found in Starter Herb seed packs too. All plants that have matured are available for harvest after 5 a.m. But you have to be on your home lot or in your home lot neighborhood at that time or they won't produce anything.

Anyway, once your Sage have evolved to Perfect quality, start grafting other plants onto it and you'll be quickly on your way to a Perfect garden. It grows year round and anything grafted onto it will grow year round too as long as it's on the Sage plant. Once you harvest grafted plants from the Sage, make sure it's the right season before planting or build a greenhouse and plant everything in there.

As someone else shared, you can use a cheat to get your plants ready to evolve by turning on testingcheats and then shift clicking on plants. I'm not exactly sure what happens when you do that since I've never tried it myself, but worth a try! :)

I hope this all helps if you want to actually grow them yourself to Perfect. But, if you don't care how they get to Perfect, just download a Perfect Garden room off the Gallery. @mcrudd is one Simmer I know that has all plants in rooms to Perfect quality that are currently available. She's really great about updating whenever a pack introduces more plants. Good luck! <3

EDIT: Forgot to add that you can get produce (seeds) in San Myshuno at produce stands too if you can't find something in season. They don't have everything, but worth a look. There's also plants available from the 'purchase gifts' option on your Sims cell. They're very expensive to get that way, but sometimes worth it to get something you can't find otherwise. I use the gift option for tulips in particular and sometimes Bonsai bush seeds too.

Also, the Ranger Station has other plants besides Growfruit too, such as tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Those can be hard to find sometimes. Especially if you're not in the right season to get them from public gardens.

@Simmerville, an easy way to evolve plants is to shift-click on a plant, choose the gardening option on the pie menu, choose the "plant evolution" option, then choose "ready to evolve". After that click on the plant again & choose "evolve." Works great ☺.

"Simmerville;c-17307797" wrote:

But I came across one more thing... In the past it seems like each plant specie had a set amount of hrs it takes to produce crops. Then there was the gardening overhaul, and it now seems like all plants spawn crops at 5 AM. Does this mean that all plant species have the same routine, or is the various hrs still in effect? I couldn't find much info regarding the growth hours vs 5 AM, so I'll need to do some testing. If there is any known facts on this please direct me to it :)

In my experience the game does check at 5am and will generate a crop if a mature plant does not yet have any crop, however I have seen crops appear during the day also. It also takes some time after the first crops appear on a plant before a full harvest is available. This is particularly important for spliced plants as the special may not appear at first and there is still a chance for one to appear until the plant reaches it's full crop.
Also plants take different amounts of time to reach maturity from planting. Parsley is the fastest I know, reaching maturity in just a few hours and will have a crop the next morning, whereas some plants can take several days, Daisy for example takes 4 days to reach maturity.

"Karababy52;c-17308040" wrote:
Here's a Plant list found on Carl's Sims 4 Guide website. It lists the number of hours it take each plant to mature and be ready to harvest. Hope this helps too! :)

Sims 4 Plant List

After you check out the plant list, I'd advise scrolling up to the top of that page and reading the entire guide. You'll find a ton of very useful information about gardening in the Sims 4. <3

Thanks. I already read that info and I can't make those hrs on Carl's site to work. I tested a few plants before I started this thread. And those hrs doesn't quite match the new 5 AM routine anyway, so I wonder if his table is a bit outdated on the hours. Don't blame him for not re-checking it after the overhaul though, because there are so many more useful tasks to explore :)

One of my friends did a complete perfect garden here, if you want to download it:
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/2D158273E3CD11E98DA1EEB2A79C7201

I don't know if she updated it with Island Living and Realm of Magic, but I put those up if you need them...

Island Living:
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/7ACF1F8C948411E9876ED63D27D2DDD7

Realm of Magic:
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/93321395D94611E982BD3A1BE21D5EF6

One thing I have noticed is when you place a room with plants in it form the gallery, you need to set the wall to its highest height first. Otherwise the plants might be too tall to be indoors and your full plant becomes a pot of dirt when you place it.

Thanks for the mention @Karababy52 :) @Simmerville I also upload perfect seeds if those are easier for you, since seasons its so hard to download a full collection plantroom and place it, most of the harvests will go back to beginning stages and take forever to grow out again, and unless your walls are full hight then you even lose some of your plants. You can find my full collection of perfect seeds here This way you can pick which ones you wanna plant too. Happy simming :) Otherwise if you go in my gallery I have a room full of growfruit, I find those to be very good fertilizer to get the evolve option more often ;)