Gardening

Gardening is a learning based skill that affects the survival rate of crops at your farm. As your Gardening skill improves, your crops will survive long enough to produce goods for you, and they may even regenerate after harvesting, so you won't need more seeds. With a high Gardening skill, you can make big profits off plants that generate gems, weapons, magic items, and other odd crops, such as fruits and vegetables. Easy Gardening suggests that planting during heavy rain will improve the quality of the crop.

Gardening will level quickly, and increase the speed at which you pick crops, during The Harvest Time jobs.  

Harvest Time quests become significantly easier when you have this skill (because the time limit is the only real challenge) and higher-level versions of the quest are essentially impossible without gardening skill. Further, the Harvest Time quest will massively increase your Gardening skill levels, especially at low levels, as each turn spent (before successfully?) harvesting a crop gives more experience.  As you can complete even high-level quests easily, Gardening, like Performer, is a skill that can be used for easy platinum and quest rewards, especially Yowyn.  

Pianists can benefit greatly from learning farming early, and travelling between Yowyn and Palmia to take the easy quests the two towns provide to farm massive quantities of platinum it takes to learn the combat skills they'll need to survive when they actually get into combat.  Farmers can likewise benefit from learning Performer, and doing the opposite.

Because rods can be farmed, gardening is of great use to anyone with Magic Device, especially general magic-users.  Even if you get a rod you don't want, you can always absorb charges from rods to refill useful rods, or spellbooks.

In regular Elona, gardening your own crops on a farm basically requires worshipping Kumiromi at least at some point, as without either the passive ability (that has a chance of turning any rotting food into seeds) or the pet cute fairy (that drops seeds when eating food), seeds are too rare to make farming feasible.  Cute fairies you have bred in a ranch will also drop seeds when they eat, so it is possible to get seeds even without actively worshipping Kumiromi or having a cute fairy in your party.

Another large benefit from having Kumiromi as your deity is that the passive increase in gardening skill that he gives can provide a massive boost to the skill, making it more likely that plants continue to produce more fruit, saving you even further on how many seeds it takes to keep a farm running; Fruits and vegetable plants almost never need new seeds when you get effetive gardening skill levels of 50+.  Even if it is only occasional, having herb seeds produce more than one crop per seed is of massive benefit.

In Elona+ you get seeds from completing The Harvest Time jobs, so worshipping Kumiromi isn't necessary. !!WARNING!! In Elona+ you won't get any exp for planting, so don't waste your seeds until you get your gardening high enough with harvest quests.

In order to keep high skill levels relevant in Elona+, a food quality level was also introduced.  This appears as something like "strawberry crepe +2" once you cook the food.  Quality bonuses seem to add 2 experience to any attribute that the food would train times the value behind the +, so that +2 fruit adds 4 experience gain to magic, perception, and charisma above what would otherwise be obtained. See the food page for details on how food trains attributes.

Also in Elona+, is organic fertilizer, which can give a boost to fruit and vegetable crop quality.  (Lower chances of crops dying, and higher chances of +quality bonuses.)

Trained skill

You may learn Gardening from the trainer in Yowyn.

Races

• None

Classes

• Farmer

Wishing

• skillgard will increase Gardening by 1 level and train its potential.