While it’s since become a staple of the franchise, gardening was first introduced to The Sims in the Unleashed expansion, bringing our Sims and their beloved furry friends out into the yard to get in touch with nature together, offering a few different crops to grow and harvest at home.
After investing in a few gardening plots and the seeds to go in them, put a scarecrow on the lot or entrust pest control to your new pet cat, and you’ll have a pantry full of fresh produce grown from your own garden in The Sims 1 in no time.
How To Start A Garden
Buy Seeds And Gardening Plots
Introduced in Unleashed, your Sims are able to plant and tend to crops on their home lot with a bit of careful planning and attention. The Sims Legacy Collection comes with six total crops for your Sims to grow: carrots, elderberries, grapes, green beans, lettuce, and tomatoes, with elderberries and grapes largely used for nectar-making as part of the Makin’ Magic expansion.
You’ll need to head out to one of the public spaces and buy standard seeds from a seed rack. Though you may find these displays scattered throughout the downtown areas, your best bet is to go to Custer’s Market in the Old Town district, which has not only seeds but all the rest of your gardening needs covered. Meanwhile, you’ll need to go to a market location in Magic Town and purchase from those seed racks to buy Elderberry and Grape Sprigs.
While lettuce and carrots will need to be replanted each time you harvest them, the other crops will regrow when tended to, requiring only one seed to produce plenty of crops. To save your Sim a few trips to the public lots to restock on seeds, you may be wise to invest in plants that regrow automatically, especially once you’ve gotten the hang of tending to a garden.
Like in later entries in the Sims series, you’ll need to buy a gardening plot for your home lot before you get down to earth and planting your garden. If you’re playing in the Legacy Collection, you’ll find a handful of different gardening plots in build mode, and which one you’ll need to purchase depends on which crops you’re trying to grow – the two plots each grow different crops. The Insta-Plot Victory Garden is for your standard veggies, while the As the Plot Thickens grows the fruits needed for nectar-making.
Garden Plot
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What Grows Here?
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Insta-Plot Victory Garden |
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As the Plot Thickens |
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You can’t cross-plant your seeds between the two types of gardening plots in The Sims 1, so be mindful of where you’re planting which seed and which gardening plots you’re puchasing to plant them in.
With any seed in your Sim’s inventory, click the gardening plot and choose which seed you’d like to plant. You can plant one seed per gardening plot. Thankfully, while the Sims in the original game were much more limited by objects in their path blocking them from walking, you can walk over garden plots, so you don’t need to save much space between them.
How To Tend To And Harvest Crops
Got your seeds in the ground? The first part of your work is complete, but the gardening has only just begun. Your Sim will need to weed and water the garden regularly to keep the plants healthy as they grow, which can take some work when your needs alone are already tricky to contend with! Additionally, you’ll need to worry about fending off garden pests like gophers or rabbits who can and will eat your crops right from the garden plots.
If you’ve got a pet cat, then letting them out will take care of that pesky pest problem, or you could choose to put a scarecrow nearby to keep the rodents at bay. Unlike the gardening plots that come from the build mode, scarecrows are considered a Decoration, so you’ll find them in buy mode instead. If you’re trying to limit access to your garden, try building a fence with only one access point into the garden, and place the scarecrow nearby to fend off unwanted visitors.
During the growing process, you can purchase and apply Plant Tonic to your crops after talking to Gardener Bob at Custer’s Market. It’s §35 per bottle and can easily help your crops grow faster and more fertile. It might also kill your crops, but you’ve got to take some risks to grow some mega-crops.
Once you’ve plucked your crops from the garden in The Sims, you’ll have two options for what to do with your yield: you can either sell your crops to earn some simoleons by heading back to Custer’s Market and interacting with the Vegano Market Cart. If you’d rather keep your harvest at home, you can stash fruits and veggies in a kitchen pantry to keep them at home and use them for meal prep (or magic use).
Even if you have no crops presently in your pantry, you can always grab a snack from it either way!
