Gardening is a great way to earn money in The Sims 3. It is a favorite of many due to the gradual progression of your cultivation. With the passage of time you will accumulate more and more expensive plants. These can have a huge impact on your game. Let’s learn some tips to be a better gardener and earn more money doing it.

Start with the most expensive thing you can grow. You can collect seeds, but it’s just as good to buy food in bulk at the grocery store. That’s right, mature produce from the store can get stuck in the ground. These plants won’t be as high-quality as the seeds, but you can have a lot of them.

Row your garden and buy sprinklers. You can leave them on 24/7 and it won’t harm the plants. For a more realistic approach, get a few levels in Handiness until your Sim learns how to upgrade sprinklers for automatic water. Buying your first sprinkler will save you enough time to study usability in the library here and there.

It will take a few days before your crops are ready. In the meantime, keep them watered. Use something cheap as a fertilizer until you can afford the good stuff. With plants that are worth more, you will see a quality increase from using fertilizer that will pay for itself. Fertilized plants grow faster and will be worth more.

When it’s harvest time, you can sell multiple plants in your inventory by dragging the box in your inventory to the Simoleon icon. Store some of them in the fridge, and your Sim will now cook with those ingredients whenever it gets a chance. That increases the quality of the meals, which will give you a more powerful mood when eating.

Look around the cemetery in Sunset Valley to find special seeds. You will also find them while you venture into the cemetery catacombs. To do that, click on the building in the center and choose ‘Explore’. Check back every day for more special seeds, which can be planted at gardening level 7.

Two special plants are the fruit of life, the money tree, and the flower of death. Flowers of Death prevent the disappearance of your Sim: they are exchanged with the Reaper in exchange for life. Harvesting money bags from money trees is worth a ton of money and don’t die as long as you take care of them. The Fruit of Life is used in the level 10 cooking recipe, Ambrosia, which grants Sims immortality and raises the dead as ghosts.

Use the skill journal to keep track of your gardening skill challenges. This will help you increase your Sim’s gardening potential. Other things you can do to increase potential are the green thumb trait, the super green thumb reward, and using garlic, life fruits, or vampire fish as fertilizer (never dead fish).

Gardening is a rewarding skill in The Sims 3. You can earn a lot of money, have a happy Sim who always scores points, and cook the best possible meals. There is much more to the gardening skill, but this should be enough information to get you started!