Talk:Gardening (The Sims 3)

Plants
Somebody added that you can seed cheese and egg plants at max skill level. Is that true? One of my sims has 10 in gardening but he couldn't plant cheese/egg before getting the opportunity reward. Uly 23:08, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Not true, verified and has been removed.

Money Tree resistant/immune to becoming barren?
After about 10 weeks of in-game time, the first planted Money Tree has yet to become barren. However, all other plants (except Omni plant, which has not been planted yet) have undergone at least 2 barren cycles.

Can anyone confirm this?

No, my Money Tree became barren around Week 16. Plant Name: Money Tree

Rarity: Special

Skill Points Gained When Planted: 375

Skill Points Gained When Harvested: 300

Performance Threshold Between Average and Good: 65

Performance Threshold Between Good and Great: 75

Performance Change in Dry Soil: -60

Performance Change in Neutral Soil: -30

Performance Change in Wet Soil: 30

Water Decay: 2

Weed Chance: 0.25

Harvest State Duration Minimum: 5

Harvest State Duration Maximum: 10

Number of Harvestables in Lifetime: 10000

Minimum Harvestables Per Harvest Cycle: 2

Maximum Harvestables Per Harvest Cycle: 5

Plant Model Type: MoneyTree

Hence the money tree will become barren after 10000 money bags harvested.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.255.7.214 (talk • contribs) - Sign your comments with ~

Death flower - 2 harvests max or more?
I have experimented with 50 plantings of the Death Flower, and none of them managed to exceed 2 harvests. All of the ones which were successfully resurrected two times uniformly became barren. None of these resurrected once became barren, although quite a portion failed on their first/second resurrect.

Baseline: Can anyone else carry out a repeat of this experiment to confirm results? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.255.7.214 (talk • contribs) - Sign your comments with ~
 * Edit: Plant Name: Death Flower Bush

Rarity: Special

Skill Points Gained When Planted: 375

Skill Points Gained When Harvested: 300

Performance Threshold Between Average and Good: 60

Performance Threshold Between Good and Great: 65

Performance Change in Dry Soil: -30

Performance Change in Neutral Soil: -5

Performance Change in Wet Soil: 25

Water Decay: 1.2

Weed Chance: 0.025

Harvest State Duration Minimum: 5

Harvest State Duration Maximum: 12

Number of Harvestables in Lifetime: 2

Minimum Harvestables Per Harvest Cycle: 1

Maximum Harvestables Per Harvest Cycle: 1

Plant Model Type: DeathFlowerBush

Confirmed 2 maximum harvests per plant. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.255.7.214 (talk • contribs) - Sign your comments with ~

Roast & Links Quality
Roasts and Links that I purchase from the grocery store are Normal quality. Unlike Cheese, Eggs, Steak, and Patties, Links and Roasts cannot be planted. Putting them in Omni plants does not seem to have any effect on their quality. Is there any way to improve the quality of Links and Roasts? Thanks for any info.—ErzengelLichtes (Contribs) 00:07, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

16/8 new grapes?
The game XML files only show 6 types of new grapes, which are all found in France. In total, 10 new plants have been added, all of which can be used in Nectar making, up from 6 in the base game. If there are 8 new grapes, the 2 yet to be discovered ones cannot be planted as per normal. Hence, the part about 8 new grapes has been removed.

Talking to plants
Does it increase quality in TS3, or is that just a TS2: Seasons thing? Dharden (talk) 22:07, July 22, 2010 (UTC)


 * Nope, Talking to plants only satisfies the Sim's Social Need. Nothing else. Pretty useless if you are not living alone.

HOW to garden
I know you're all snickering at me. But for 3 days I've been playing my garden-oriented Sim. And for 3 days I have clicked, dragged, cursed, banged my mouse and otherwise expressed my frustration - HOW do I garden? It's not from clicking on my yard, my fences, my sim, my house, my pond, etc. Maybe it's too simplistic to include this level of basic information in the wiki, but if someone would tell ME how to do it, I'd really appreciate it!! :) Thanks!

Go to the bookstore and buy the gardening books. Read at least one to get some skill level in gardening. That will give you some seeds in your inventory. You can also buy veggies and fruits at the grocery store. Once that's in your inventory, you can click on what it is you want to plant within your inventory, and it'll give you the option to plant. Then it shows a little pile of soil and you place that on a flat surface in your yard. If you have multiples of one thing, like apples, and you click on that, you can also "Plant Many" and that will let you place more little soil piles. Hope this helps! Trimalynn 15:10, April 3, 2011 (UTC)

New page for Flame fruit
Flame fruit isn't your average tomato. Since life fruit and death flowers have their own articles, describing their unique characteristics in detail, shouldn't flame fruit also be treated that way? -- TechpriestMagos 00:16, January 5, 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm... I guess you're right. Since it hasn't had its own page, you could try making one for it. Ask us if you need help create one.  Nikel  Talk  14:41, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

Bananas
This article needs to be updated for Bananas in Showtime.  Nikel  Talk  15:00, March 20, 2012 (UTC)
 * I heard from modthesims that bananas grow on an apple tree. Is this some kind of joke or EA was being lazy again?  Nikel  Talk  14:06, May 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * No, they grow on a tree but not an apple tree unless you can use mods. What were they thinking? I mean it does look similar because well they grow on trees, but cherries do too. :I Starmoonie - Talk Here  14:10, May 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * this tread in particular. See the image? Does banana really grow in such tree? O.o Also, is banana used to throw at bad performers? Sometimes I just don't understand what people are talking about, especially if I don't play the game myself.  Nikel  Talk  14:19, May 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, in real life bananas tend to grow different types of trees not just the one on the right. So EA really didn't messed up just that they probably didn't want to over do it since would take a lot of time just to create a different tree just for bananas. And yeah bananas are thrown at bad performers, I mean basically anything can be thrown at them that's small. I wouldn't trust the site too much it not that accurate like here. Maybe they should really get their information and contribute here if they know so much. xD Starmoonie - Talk Here  14:27, May 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, it's just a matter of different world, really. You will never find anyone from MATY in here for sure. :p But they do sometimes get some references in this wiki though.
 * Anyway, I never really saw banana grows on other kinds of tree other than the one like Castaway Stories. It can be linked with EA's laziness as well, so it still makes sense. And the throwing at performer thingy really makes me laugh. XD I don't know why I found it hilarious.  Nikel  Talk  14:46, May 28, 2012 (UTC)

Plasma Fruit
In my experience, the plasma fruit plant produces precisely one fruit per harvest cycle. It doesn't seem to last for too many cycles either, although I haven't tested that specifically. (This naturally put it on my list for omni-fodder.) The wiki lacks this information not only for the plasma fruit, but for many non-Base plants. Is there a good way to discover the more abstract qualities of the plants, or is that a matter of diligent experimentation? -- Lexmechanic (talk) 20:21, September 27, 2012 (UTC)

Island Paradise Plants!
Add the Kelp! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ariel Baron (talk • contribs) (UTC) - Please sign your comments with ~
 * I don't really think kelp should be included here. It's not considered "plant" in the game, and it has nothing to do with Gardening.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  16:32, February 12, 2014 (UTC)
 * I've been thinking about removing Kelp with the reasons above. Kelp is not a plant in the game.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  16:13, February 16, 2014 (UTC)

Plants from Sims 3 Store
I was going through the list of plants to try to identify where to get each of them when I realized that the store ones only say they are from the store and give no further details. I've compiled a list of the harvestables from the store so that they can be worked in to the page as admins or regular contributors see fit: Also of interest are the SwiftGro Gardening Station  and Sunflower  from the Stones Throw Greenhouse venue. With this set you can water all of the plants inside the greenhouse with a sprinkler system, use the composter to fertilize and weed all of the plants in the greenhouse, use the magnifying glass to identify seeds, collect sunlight objects from the sunflower, and advance all plants to their next growth state by fertilizing with the sunflight objects. I hope this helps.Suceress (talk) 10:09, April 15, 2014 (UTC)
 * Lemon and Eggplant (purple eggplant?) come from the Al Fresco Street Market venue.
 * Orange comes from the Grandpa's Grove venue. This can also be found under Sets on the store page.
 * Blackberry, Blueberry, Cocoa, Peach, Pear, Pecan, Raspberry, and Strawberry come from the Bohemian Garden set.
 * I've improved the article by adding info about the premium contents. Check it out now. Thanks for the heads up! :)  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  13:37, April 15, 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Nikel. I see you expanded upon the functionality and listed things I forgot to mention. Man, I wish my real-life tractor worked like the one in the game. LOL. I'd be happy if it would at least start and not blow black smoke everywhere.Suceress (talk) 13:36, April 19, 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes. Sometimes things in The Sims universe is too good to be real. Like money tree...  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  13:48, April 19, 2014 (UTC)
 * LOL. Yeah. That's a good point. In real life my blueberries, strawberries, and mulberries get picked off by birds. The apples, persimmons, and pears get picked off by deer. The blackberries are thorny and grow like crazy and block walking paths. Of course, there are a lot more plants to harvest in real life so it sort of balances out. It will be interesting to see what they do with Sims 4.Suceress (talk) 00:28, April 21, 2014 (UTC)
 * I love that there are so many varieties of harvestable plants in The Sims 3. Sadly, some are wrong and made lazily. For example, bananas grow on an apple tree.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  11:37, April 21, 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, that banana thing drove me crazy when I saw the pictures! Its not like they couldn't get the model from other EA games! I hope that they will fix it with a patch or that someone will do a default replacement with custom content. I know that my pear tree looks quite different from my apple tree in real life, but they are still similar enough that I can forgive EA for making those plants identical-- but the banana tree? That is something with such a unique shape that I can't easily excuse them for making it look like an apple tree. Btw, I submitted some info in the talk page for the Cooking section. I just have no idea how to incorporate a lot of that into in the main article without changing the format quite a bit. I did go ahead and change the icons to display the expansion name OnMouseOver though-- the lack of that display drove me bananas when I first looked at it.Suceress (talk) 08:25, April 22, 2014 (UTC)
 * If you could still take it, there's actually a model of banana tree in World Adventures. Did EA just forget or what?


 * I've read your message in the Cooking talk page. And wow, I want to say thank you for collecting all those information. I also want to revamp that article some time in the future, much like this page, but I don't have time for that at the moment. Thanks for changing the icons too! Don't worry too much about changing the format. You can experiment before submitting your edit, and see if it fits to the page.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  06:46, April 23, 2014 (UTC)


 * The image link didn't work for me. ISP gave me some line about too many redirects, but I think I remember seeing the tree. I think the problem was not the lack of the mature tree model, but perhaps they didn't feel like doing the other stages of the tree's life. I chalk it up to them being lazy and probably rushing to get the stuff ready. They had to program the animations and interactions and all sorts of stuff so the graphics for one tree were probably not high on their priority list.
 * I can't take credit for compiling the info on the cooking page since I took it from a post from Carl's Sims 3 Guide. Credit should go to the person who posted it over there. He/she really did a good job of gathering all of that info and presenting it. The thing I'm wondering about is if something requires more than one expansion/item to work, should there be more than one icon? Say something requires Night Life AND a store item to make a recipe, would there just be a note, or would it have two icons?
 * When I'm not being lazy I should probably open a Sandbox and start playing around with that page. That way it could be viewed for approval first. The key is not being lazy. LOL. I completely understand not having the time. This is all for fun, so I appreciate the time that you have put in to the wiki.Suceress (talk) 10:40, April 24, 2014 (UTC)

Check my post in this thread about the banana tree. And yes, I agree about them being lazy. You pretty much summed up my opinion, but I think it really shouldn't be an excuse. That is pure laziness.

Ah, I see. But I'd like to thank you too for putting them up here. It's okay if one list have two icons at once. Sometimes it's just necessary after all, but sometimes it could be ambiguous as well. It could mean one only needs Late Night EP or the premium content, and the other could mean it needs both. It could be intuitive actually. I'm sure readers could figure the icons out themselves.

Haha, you could just try out editing any time. :D And there's no need for approval, really. It's just as long as you didn't break the page, but don't worry about that either! All constructive edits always mean good. :)  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  12:46, April 24, 2014 (UTC)


 * Considering how much EA charges for the expansion when they are first out, I completely agree that it isn't a good excuse. With the resources they have and the amount of money they pull in, it really is inexcusable. I used to pre-order things but after so many bugs and problems I decided to wait for bug fixes and for prices to go down. I haven't purchased anything after Pets because a lot of the new mechanics did not interest me. I especially despise the online thing where it tries to make you login and will not give you an option to cancel so you just have to wait until it decides it can't connect (which can take 10 minutes on my connection) or it finally does. And they do not have an option to disable it now.


 * After playing around with the plant table I realized that adding more than one icon would probably stretch the table so that it would have to scroll side to side-- and that just doesn't look good. Sorry for the confusion on creating my sandbox. At least I know how to use Source mode. I got yelled at on another wiki when I was new and tried to contribute something and it added some weirdness in Visual that I didn't know about because I didn't notice the Source button. I'm going to have to look over the recipes and the current table and figure out the best way to update it in an efficient manner. Since I don't have the store items, I'll have to look at discussions and ask people who actually have the items for some info. Suceress (talk) 15:05, April 24, 2014 (UTC)


 * I think it's not right if you got yelled because you somehow messed up the layout. Accidents happen, and it's impolite if you got yelled because of that. They should've guided you to help you with editing instead! I do suggest that you get used with source code though. It's tidier and less complicated, in my opinion. I'm focusing on my exam this week (and yet I still linger in this wiki XP), so I'll try to help you when my exams are over. :)  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  17:26, April 27, 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Nikel. The earlier incident happened on a Talk page. The person yelled at me before she knew that I didn't see the Source button and that I didn't know that just pasting something from another website would add extra code. Once I told her that I didn't know what "extra code" she was talking about she apologized and explained how to use Source mode. I had to disable some of my addons to get it to work (because I had something that stopped it from going to source mode when I clicked on the tab). There is no rush. Good luck on your exams!
 * I just had a thought.. Maybe if I can add footnotes with reference numbers to some of the plants it can explain lower down what the notes are on certain things-- like details on where they are found or any special circumstances needed to acquire them.Suceress (talk) 05:58, April 28, 2014 (UTC)
 * You could use the tag to make a footnote. The content of the footnote can be written like this: . If you want the same footnote to be used multiple times, consider using this: , and then to reuse it, use  .  Nikel   Talk  –  Vote!  08:51, April 29, 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok. I'll have to look at it later and play around with it. Had a death in the family and the viewing of the body is today and the funeral is tomorrow. Not so fun times.Suceress (talk) 18:24, April 29, 2014 (UTC)

corn and cucumber icons
I asked around and got some people to upload their screenshots of the icons for the cucumber fruit and corn fruit. I googled quite a bit to see if I could find good images and the ones I uploaded were the best ones that I could find. The cucumber one is not the best. I wonder if there will be a fix for that to improve the image, but I sort of doubt it. Anyway, I took the images and put them in to the blue background to make the icon. I hope they are ok.Suceress (talk) 05:22, July 17, 2014 (UTC)
 * It's a bit late to say this, but thank you! :)  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  11:49, August 1, 2014 (UTC)


 * Better late than never. :-)  My pleasure. The misssing images were driving me batty. LOL. I think that its possible that the corn icon is actually from a temporary fix someone did at MTS and that the real corn icon looks much like the cucumber icon but I don't have either so I don't know. I think the existing corn icon looks better and from screenshots the corn looks like that in the game. Suceress (talk) 06:25, August 3, 2014 (UTC)

What can omni plant be fed with?
I just saw that someone claimed that the omni plant can't be fed with a death flower, but the edit was later undone. This made me feel curious about what can really be fed to the omni plant. The thing is, I never really had the omni plant in my game (therefore never experienced the "can't order the omni plant glitch"), so I don't know whether this is true or not. As a shortcut, I checked the game codes, and the following is what items can be fed to the omni plant:
 * Books (general, fishing, skill, toddler, written)
 * Ingredients
 * Candles
 * Rubber duckies
 * Stuffed animals
 * Toy box toys

These are just classes of objects, so the possibilities are more than just these. However, there are also some interesting things to notice:
 * 1) Only the books listed above can be fed to the omni plant, even though there are more book types than just those: cooking recipes, alchemy recipes, and comic books. Does this mean these books can't be fed to the omni plant? I should check that some time.
 * 2) 'Ingredients' is very broad. There are so many objects that count as 'ingredients'. Generally, these objects are harvestable produce and fish, but not limited to those. I believe the game defines 'ingredients' are things that can be used for cooking, but I'm sure there's more than that. There are some items that I think are interesting to note:
 * 3) Death flowers and forbidden fruit, for instance, are harvestable produce (plantables), but they can't be cooked. Does this mean they're not ingredients, which in turn cannot be fed to the omni plant? Noted.
 * 4) Kelp cannot be planted, but I believe it's considered an 'ingredient' even if it can't be cooked! This should be checked.
 * 5) Some mushrooms are edible, while some aren't, like glow mushrooms. Nonetheless, I'm unsure if the game rules them out of 'ingredients'. After all, they're used as alchemy ingredients... but not cooking. Do they count as 'ingredients'? I swear 'ingredients' is one of the most complex subject in the game.
 * 6) I suppose 'stuffed animals' means the teddy bears. Imaginary friend dolls also count as 'stuffed animals', but I'm unsure if it can really be fed to the omni plant since that doll is somewhat special (and who really wants multitudes of the cursed imaginary friend dolls anyway??). I should check this too.

I just hope when I have the time, I really remember to check this up.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  14:02, November 26, 2014 (UTC)