How To Maximise Gardening Skill In The Sims 2: Seasons

Gardening is a staple of simulation games, and The Sims 2 is no exception. You can grow your own harvest of tasty cucumbers, strawberries, and more to freshen up your fridge or as a green money-making scheme thanks to Build Mode’s packed garden centre.

The gardening mechanic also gives an interesting insight into the game’s talent badge and hobbies systems, making it a great way of getting to grips with a lot of what the game has to offer. Learn while you earn by building a bumper orangery, apple orchard, or the tiny greenhouse of your dreams.

How To Build A Garden

You’ll need dirt patches and/or fruit trees to start growing your own fruits and vegetables. Enter Build Mode and select the watering can icon to go into the Garden Centre. Then, click the plant pot on the right.

Everything you need is on this menu. Select the dirt tool and drag it across the area you wish to plant your garden on. This tool functions largely the same as other flooring tools. You’ll be able to interact with this in Live Mode to buy plants.

If you want to grow fruit trees, you’ll need to buy them separately in Build Mode’s garden centre, rather than directly from the dirt plot. You can get three different kinds of fruit trees in the same section: apples, oranges, and lemons.

Some optional items that can make your life easier while growing a garden include:

• Sprinklers
• Compost bins
• Ladybug Loft
• Greenhouse walls, doors, and roofs
• Servo

How To Build A Greenhouse

You can shelter your garden patch by building a greenhouse. This works similarly to building a house, but instead of the normal wall tool, you have to select one of the three colours of greenhouse wall that are in Build Mode’s garden centre.

Select the greenhouse wall item and drag it across the area where you want to construct a wall. It functions the same as the regular wall tool. Rinse and repeat until you have a fully enclosed area that is ideally rectangular or square.

You’ll still need to spread a dirt plot inside the greenhouse too.

Next, you’ll need to add a greenhouse door. There are three of these to match the wall colours. Place it on a greenhouse wall like you would a normal door or window. Finally, select the corresponding roof tool from the same section and drag it across the top of the walls to finish constructing your greenhouse.

While The Sims 2 wasn’t the first game to introduce gardening, it was the first to introduce fully functional greenhouses.

How To Plant Crops

Select the dirt patch you built, and you will see the option to plant tomatoes. At first, this is the only thing you’ll be able to grow, but your options will expand with time and a little effort. Your Sim will pay for the seeds and the plant will start to grow.

If you place any fruit trees, they will automatically start growing fruit. They can grow apples, oranges, or lemons, depending on which one you choose.

How To Unlock New Plants

The Sims 2 relies on the talent badge system from Open For Business instead of a gardening skill system, which wasn’t introduced until The Sims 3. However, the talent badge system operates in largely the same way: the longer you spend gardening, the better you get.

You can only grow fruits, berries, and legumes. There aren’t any vegetables or herbs.

As your Sims get their badges, they’ll unlock new crops, as well as having everything from the previous levels available:

The best way to perfect gardening in the least amount of time is by playing with a PlantSim. This is because PlantSims automatically have a gold talent badge in gardening.

How Much Do Crops Sell For?

Once your harvestables have grown, you can sell them by clicking the plant and using the Sell Produce interaction. Crops of the highest quality sell for:

Watch out, as harvestables decrease in value if they’re lower quality. The higher the harvest quality, the more Simoleons you’ll make from selling them.

How To Sell Fruit For More Money

You can also run your own grocery store and sell your fresh produce using the Open For Business community lot mechanics. Either open a home business or buy a community lot, a DecraChill Display by Refrigifreeze, and a cash register, and you’re good to go.

With the DecraChill Display by Refrigifreeze placed in your business, select it and stock it with your freshly harvested goods. From there, you can choose to price up your produce to make more money from it.

This method takes longer than selling the crops directly, and there are much higher overheads for getting set up, but you can make much more money from it in the long run.

Tips For Growing A Good Garden

Now that you know the basics of growing your own food, you can focus on perfecting it. This way, you can grow more efficiently with seasonal change in mind and start growing the best quality harvestables possible.

Pay Attention To Your Plant’s Harvest Quality

You might have noticed that your crops have a Harvest Quality attached to them. This reflects how much love and care the plants have received while growing. Harvest quality is measured on a three-point scale, from worst to best:

• Bland
• Tasty
• Mouthwatering

If your plant says it is thriving, then you’re well on your way to harvesting some high-quality fruit.

To get the best quality crops you can, make sure your plants are well watered, tended to, and get plenty of sunlight, whether it’s in a greenhouse or outdoors. You can water them manually, get help from a gardener or servo, or buy sprinklers.

Already got a gold gardening talent badge for your Sim? That means you’ve unlocked some new interactions. Selecting your plants will reveal the new Talk To interaction, which will help your plants thrive in no time.

Fertilise Plants Frequently

You should also fertilise your plants regularly. You don’t have to do this to keep your plants alive, but it’s the easiest way of improving them. You can buy fertiliser for 10 Simoleons by clicking on the garden plot directly and using Fertilise. Or, you can make your own with a compost bin.

You can buy the Composting Apparatus by Apparati Aplenty bin from Build Mode’s garden centre, along with the other gardening gear.

If you’re done with the plants you have in your dirt patch, you can use the Compost interaction to add them to your compost bin. This will give you more to fertilise your garden with.

Join The Garden Club

When you started up your new household, you probably had a visit from the local gardening club. You can join them at any time to get discounted prices on seeds and fertiliser.

The catch is, you have to have a nice, well-maintained garden already to be admitted into the club. Invite a member of the club to your lot and ask for an invitation to join. They’ll start inspecting your garden, and if they think it’s up to scratch, you’ll be a new member.

Garden club members get discounts on the following items:

There are a number of townies who are members of the garden club. Your Sim probably already knows one from when they invited themselves around when you first moved in. Try looking out for Tiffany Zarubin or Armando Cox.

Plant With The Seasons

Plants go dormant and won’t grow during the winter unless they’re covered up in a greenhouse. Wait to sow your seeds in spring, and be ready to harvest well throughout the year until the elements get too tough for them.

There’s no way of stopping fruit trees from going dormant because they won’t fit properly in greenhouses.

Take Care Of Other Plants

Unlike in later iterations of The Sims, shrubs and flowers planted around your Sim’s garden also need to be taken care of. You can do this by watering, weeding, and tending to them.

Keep an eye out for weeds and overgrown, leafy-looking shrubs in your flower beds and be ready to water anything you plant. Flowers that are in desperate need of a drink will look wilted and brown.

Interacting with plants around your property opens up every interaction you need to keep your garden looking neat and tidy. You can also hire a gardener over the phone or craft a servo to do the work for you.

You don’t have to do anything to tend to trees, so if you want a low-maintenance garden, lean towards getting them instead. Maybe a few classic pink lawn flamingos, too. But don’t let the garden club see that!