Gardening Term Question

Planting outside is more beneficial with Seasons, as rain will keep your plants watered. One less thing you need to do yourself. Besides, My garden is too big to fit indoors. I have every plant growing in it except the 10 from the National Park and the 3 from Sixam.
I don't personally have much trouble getting plants. I usually cheat for money and buy certain things, like seed packets and VoidCritters card packs, in large quantities. If any plants are missing, I usually know where they can be found or, in some cases, how to graft for them. This whole thing with the weeds option is just baffling, though. I've used the Shift+Click menu with my plants (obviously, this needs testingcheats to be on). I used it to evolve all my plants to Perfect status. I have a suspicion that "Mulching" might slow or prevent the appearance of weeds, but I haven't seen any weeds for a while anyway. It's late fall right now in my game and Patchy does a pretty good job at weed control anyway, so if that's what it does, I may not even notice any effect.

I'm in a weird place with this game right now. I haven't bought seasons yet, but I have patched the patch thing. Okay. So my sims come home from wherever the plum they've gone, the plants they take care of (game suddenly doesn't think it's a garden anymore) all look like they're dripping from a sprinkler. Does this mean that if I had seasons it would have rained and they're getting watered, but I'm just not seeing rain because I didn't buy the pack? It's weird.

I'm fairly upset with both myself and the gallery right now. I downloaded a pre-seasons made community garden that I love. Did I save it to my gallery? No, that's why I'm mad- now I can't find it in the regular gallery. Well anyhow. It seems to be all buggy. So there are things in there I want to not die, right? Forbidden fruit tree and all the exotic stuff my sims haven't found yet. I set the lot type to park. And it does seem to register as a garden, because gardener-looking people randomly show up and do things to the plants. For a while I'd have my sims go there and build skill watering things, etc. It would take one sim two days to get it all done, so I did it rotationally. Plants thrived, even if there were a whole lot of bugs around. I made it a cat hangout, the creator was nice enough to have an outdoor kitchen, and a building with bathrooms and a bed downstairs so exhausted or homeless sims can rest and attend to their non-gardening needs. Some sims harvested stuff and planted them elsewhere. It was a nice place.

Now. Here's what happens. Sim goes in with maybe 3 skill in gardening, takes his poor elderly butt four days to get anything done and I had to send him home for fear he would work himself to death. Gets stuck for seven sim hours spraying the same plant for bugs. Tried everything except rebooting the computer to get him to stop. Ugh. Sent a level ten gardener in - before this, a whole section of emotion trees were about to die from lack of water- when she came in, they're fine. She spent a week taking vacation and trying to keep up with reviving all the plants that want to die. I won't let her spray a single thing and won't click "tend garden" either because she'll get stuck spraying for bugs. She also gets stuck on watering. Water two plants and then get in a loop with them; at least that one I'm able to click it off and she'll go about doing something else. She had to pick one of nearly everything so that when it dies, she can replant it, I mean she can revive them but if she doesn't get there in time, it'll just be beyond that state. Things in her yard do not seem to need watering as much, but for plum's sake, many of them are the same plants! What makes them die so fast in that one spot??

And forget planting things outdoors on the ground; they spontaneously move from where you planted them to a spot two squares over, so planting things at night isn't advised 'cause I may not figure out where the dickens they went.

Is anyone else in this boat?! I used to love gardening! If I get Seasons will any of this mess be fixed, or will I want to tear my hair out even more?

If someone were inclined to turn off only some weather effects, I would certainly recommend lightning. You can select at least weather severity just from the core menu. Severe weather like thunderstorms and blizzards are optional. Lightning has cost me a fortune from having to replace things like outdoor lighting, at least one bee box, and a Patchy the Straw Man. My Sims have also gotten struck a few times, but thanks to a Trait purchased from the Aspiration Rewards, they actually like it. The Storm Chaser Trait gives them positive Moodlets rather than negative (like "That Was Totally Awesome!"). Some mild weather can actually be beneficial and amusing and are worth keeping. For instance, rain waters your plants for you and you can even choose to "Shower in the Rain".

The Weeds State options include "Weed Free" as the lowest level option and "Mulched" as the highest level. I suspect the former is pulled weeds. In gardening, the use of Garden Mulch is supposed to help suppress weed growth and repel bugs (that's why cedar is so often used) as well as add nutrients to the soil as the woodchip mulch rots. I'm not 100% certain yet, but I suspect this was more along the lines of what is intended, otherwise Weed Free as a low-level option would be redundant and unnecessary. As I said, It's only an educated guess. I could be wrong. I hope we learn more about this feature in the future. Maybe a code diver will find it and figure it out.

I think it means that you don't have to weed this plant for a long time.
I have been using this plant cheats to make these videos faster so I don't have to wait so long for them to grow and instead I can immediately start with fully grown plant and show off the plant care if needed. It is so great that they have put these cheats there.

@SherryRN, sure thing, I'm glad to have a gardening discussion.

Yeah, the Groups don't seem to work as well as the Clubs, for me, anyway. I haven't tried them since the expansion, tho. The spacing of the plants is important as well, as @iamsweetmystery said. And if the Sims in the Group are NPCs they might not have the right Skills, etc. Your idea about whittling the size of the garden down as much as possible is another key to keeping them flourishing. Some of the plants I don't use so much, I have spliced. With the Patch, tho, splicing is way trickier. The Rare plants really live up to their names. It can take forever for a spliced plant to actually produce them. I don't think that's a bug, but Carl's Guide or someone was talking about the chance being set to a super low number value, so I don't know if they will dial that back a bit, or not.

I kinda doubt cats would hurt the garden. It does sound like your new gardens are working all right, so yeah, that one may just be bugged. I'm not sure why you wouldn't be able to hire a gardener, so puzzling.

Yep, I noticed the yield is way less, too. (If you want to have a pretty good look at the new changes to Gardening, James, The Sim Supply on YT is doing a Seasons Let's Play which is showing a lot of them, if you're into that, haha.) I actually think the devs were going for more realism. They figured since the changes had to be made for Seasons, this was a good time for a total overhaul. It never hurts to express your thoughts, tho.

For me, before the changes, you could make a crazy amount of money on Gardening. I just think they felt maybe that was too easy, and indeed, folks had been saying that. I don't mind it being a bit more challenging. It is a royal pain until my Sims get on their feet, if I'm playing without cheats. But after that, I tend to make too much money, if there is such a thing. :D The florist bouquets do make a crap ton of money if you get good at that. You can even sell them right off the yard sale table with low overhead, and markups as well, if you have City Living or Jungle Adventure.

You can still make a fortune on gardening. The Money Tree. I have a single Perfect Money Tree and the family is making over 22,000 Simoleons a day off that alone. The sole breadwinner of the house is making over 3000 a day from his job as a Lv.10 Botanist. Then there's the mail-in Artifact Authentications. From just those 3 sources, the family is making at least 150,000 a week.

I thought I'd throw another useful gardening tip in here I just discovered. The Bonsai Tree seems to have gotten an upgrade with Seasons. It now builds Skill in both Gardening and Flower Arranging simultaneously. I set up 10 of these in a row and can quickly build two Skills at once by having a Sim prune one after the other in queue.

I didn't even know we could Shift+Click on the plants. :open_mouth: Gardening isn't quite as much fun as it was prior to Seasons, I'm sorry to say. Finding the things I need for my vegetable garden used to come down to scouring the neighborhoods for wild plants that were in need of harvesting and then planting the harvested item. One isn't always lucky to receive the seeds in any given pack. I do enjoy the additional things we can plant, however. But keeping my stuff in the Green House I built means the plants don't need as much attention as before. In some ways it's nice, in other ways, it gives my Sim less to do when the rest of the household is at work or school. Hm. Perhaps, we're both (my Sim and I) neglecting the laundry …

As to your direct question, have you or is it possible to select something from that menu? If so, select Mulched and see what happens. Perhaps, they have come up with a more direct way to fertilize our plants, other than using fish or various other harvested items.

"iamsweetmystery;c-16669897" wrote:
Planting outside is more beneficial with Seasons, as rain will keep your plants watered. One less thing you need to do yourself. Besides, My garden is too big to fit indoors. I have every plant growing in it except the 10 from the National Park and the 3 from Sixam.
I don't personally have much trouble getting plants. I usually cheat for money and buy certain things, like seed packets and VoidCritters card packs, in large quantities. If any plants are missing, I usually know where they can be found or, in some cases, how to graft for them. This whole thing with the weeds option is just baffling, though. I've used the Shift+Click menu with my plants (obviously, this needs testingcheats to be on). I used it to evolve all my plants to Perfect status. I have a suspicion that "Mulching" might slow or prevent the appearance of weeds, but I haven't seen any weeds for a while anyway. It's late fall right now in my game and Patchy does a pretty good job at weed control anyway, so if that's what it does, I may not even notice any effect.

In my current family I only have the flowers indoors -- I built a greenhouse/conservatory room for my floral arranging Sim. The veggies, herbs and trees stay outside. (Next time I do a gardening Sim I'll have the garden closer to the house -- my Sim had a hard time during blizzards going out to harvest.)

I wonder if that menu comes up when using a mod like UI Cheats Extension or MCCC (with cheats enabled) but not for the mod-free, which is why players haven't noticed it.