Gardening Term Question

@"Livin in Sim" - I did try it. My Money Tree came up in weeds yesterday. The weeds vanished when I used the Mulched option. I don't know much yet beyond that. It may be too soon to tell whether the weeds will come back or not.

Mulch means to grind up. Think of when you cut grass with a lawnmower without using a bag or deflector that spits it out the side, the blades then spend a longer time cutting the grass down to a fine cut or mulch. In the game its basically the term for pulling weeds.

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.

@"Livin in Sim" - Howdy, sorry it took so long to get back to you.
Let's see if I can reply to all your points... No, I don't have mods. So that was an easy one to not worry about.
The game, for certain sim households with a lot full of planted things, would not allow a gardener to be hired.
I do have the Get Together expansion. And I'm thinking I'll get Seasons in the next few months. I've tried the group thing. People got stuck, and it was not a lot different. More "stuff" did not actually wind up being accomplished.

What I did, was look at it like this. I spent ages on the gallery and never found that lot. Then I took a good look at why it was so challenging. Well, because there were too many of each plant, is why. And since I got it before I got the pet expansion and pack and things, there were plants missing, so a whole small section hadn't had anything in, at all. But still, too many plants. I mean, fifteen apple trees and twelve emotion trees are not really necessary, are they? Two to four of everything else, with trash plants right in the middle, making sims unhappy every time they get near them. Hm.

So I found a garden I liked better, and tried it out in another save, and since more than one sim has picked the dickens out of the one garden, just in case, I'll probably replace it with the smaller one. It has a different feel to it, the plants are a little more spread out, there are quite a few spliced things in there, and there's a big pink tree whose significance escapes me right now, but will be fun to go through the portal thing later on and see what that's about. And I downloaded to my library to make sure I'd got a copy before I got to see if it will be good or weird. And then I got excited and downloaded a garden in a big greenhouse looking thing, and stuck it in the ... not the city living world, but the one with the business lots, and played with it. It's nice. Then just to stay up longer and avoid going to bed for no reason, I started a new sim household, and made her play with plants, and tested the reset business with testing cheats. Turned out I already had it enabled, and it worked well. And even better, she was able to hire a gardener. Interesting. I didn't pay any attention to how well he did, got sleepy and went to bed.

I am wondering, since the one I started playing with at first isn't there, and believe me I looked, maybe it was a buggy thing and isn't there now for a good reason? Anyhow I did go back and fiddle with it, next day, have not removed it yet from the main save, but good grief. It's going to plum in a hand basket. I wonder if making it a cat hangout did something, too? Did the kitties pee ammonia all over the plants and kill them? Does that even happen in this game? I don't think I'll make many places an actual "hangout" now, seeing how they decline to share perfectly fine litterboxes.

I went and did some reading up on Seasons, and I do think I'll enjoy it once I get it. The floral designer career branch looks interesting. And thanks for taking the time to discuss all that with me.

SherryRN touched on a good point about gardening. Spacing. I have it down to a specific method at this point, myself. When placing planting boxes, I leave at least one full space on at least 3 sides so the Sim doing the gardening can reach every plant in it, as you can fit up to 4. I don't waste planter boxes on trees or Sixam Mosquito Traps since they need to be placed in the center and require an entire box each. Instead, I just plant those things straight in the ground. I leave at least 2 spaces between trees so the branches don't overlap, allowing clear visibility of the entire plant.
On another side note, I don't know what they did to the plants since Seasons got going, but the yield has been pathetic. It used to be that most plants put out 10 fruit or flowers a day, but now it's down to maybe 3 if I'm lucky. And with most plants going dormant 1/2 - 3/4 of the year and spending a few days regrowing when they come back into season, it cuts yield even farther overall. I'm really disappointed about this. It's making it hard to build up food and flower supplies. It's very frustrating. Unless it's a coding oversight they intend to fix, it just feels like they sabotaged gardening.

@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 love the idea of a greenhouse! My garden is always huge and I didn't know we could shift+click on plants either. One thing I've found since Seasons, is that unless its winter, it's always raining! I had to turn that off for a while.