The Sims 4 Gardening and Grafting Guide: Rare Plants and Money

Gardening is one of the cheapest ways to stack simoleons in The Sims 4. A few seed packets, a patch of dirt, and a couple of in-game weeks turn into a backyard business that pays while your Sim sleeps. It also feeds the household for free, and the rare plants you can breed through grafting sell for hundreds a pop. The whole thing runs on a single skill that levels fast, so it's a great first hobby for a brand new Sim.

Starting a Garden

You barely need anything to begin. Buy a Garden Pot for 50 simoleons or a Planter Box for 200, then click it and pick Purchase Seeds. The pot holds one plant. The box holds four plants or one tree. Honestly, you can skip both. Dragging a fruit or flower straight onto the ground works just as well and costs nothing, since pots mostly matter when you want crops growing indoors.

Seeds come from a few places:

• Click a computer and choose Purchase Seeds
• Click any garden pot or planter box
• Open the Shopping app on your Sim's phone and filter to Gardening
• Check Build Mode under Outdoor Activities

Starter packets cost pocket change and come in four flavors: Starter Flowers, Starter Fruits, Starter Herbs, and Starter Vegetables. What's inside is random each time. Flowers can give Bluebells, Chrysanthemums, or Holly. Fruits lean toward Apple, Grapes, and Plantain. Herbs are Basil, Parsley, and Sage, while vegetables cover Carrot, Mushroom, Spinach, and friends. Grab a couple of packets in each group early on so your garden has some variety.

Once a packet lands in your Sim's inventory, open it first. Then drag the contents onto the ground, lay them out in whatever shape you like, click one, and choose Plant. Your Sim plants the whole queue in one pass. Water everything after, since that first round of watering hands out a ton of early skill XP.

The skill unlocks matter more than the packets do, so here's the road map:

• Level 2 - Research Gardening on the computer. It makes your Sim Focused, and Focused Sims earn gardening XP faster.
• Level 3 - Fertilize unlocks.
• Level 4 - Talk to Plants. Sounds silly, but it fills the Social need while your Sim works, no phone required.
• Level 5 - Take Cutting and Graft. This is the doorway to every rare plant in the game.
• Level 7 - Tend Garden (water and weed the whole plot with one click), plus the Farmer and Uncommon seed packets.
• Level 8 - Super Sell, which empties a whole garden's harvest in seconds.
• Level 10 - Rare seed packets unlock, at 1,000 simoleons each.

A couple of setup choices help too. The Loves Outdoors trait keeps your Sim happy while they toil in the dirt, and Genius makes the Focused mood easier to hold. The Freelance Botanist aspiration hands out satisfaction points the whole way up, and its goals line up with what you'd be doing anyway.

One wrinkle if you own Seasons: the calendar now runs the show. Crops only grow in their season, and an out-of-season plant just sits there dormant. It survives and keeps its quality levels, but it won't grow, evolve, or take fertilizer until its season rolls back around. The workaround is sneaky but simple. Plants under any roof, awning, or greenhouse covering ignore seasons completely, so a covered garden grows everything all year.

Plant Quality and Care

The daily loop is water, weed, and check for bugs. The game runs its garden check around 6am, deciding which plants are thirsty and which ones sprout weeds. Rain handles the watering for you in Seasons, which is a nice freebie. Bugs show up as a little black swarm around a plant, and they'll wreck it faster than plain neglect, so spray the moment you spot one. Infestations get worse in spring, at least with Seasons installed.

Every plant climbs a five-step quality ladder: Normal, Nice, Excellent, Magnificent, and Perfect. When a plant has been happy for a while, it sparkles, and that sparkle means the Evolve button is live. Clicking it bumps the plant up one level, and every harvest after that comes out at the higher quality. Hover a plant to see where it currently sits.

Don't sit on ripe fruit waiting to evolve, though. A harvestable's quality gets locked in at the moment it grows, so letting it hang there gains you nothing. Pick it, sell it, and let the plant get started on the next batch. A mature plant holds roughly 4 to 6 pieces at a time depending on the type, and clearing it before morning makes room for fresh ones to spawn.

Fertilizer is the speed button, and it unlocks at level 3. Fish are the best fuel by far, and the heavier the catch, the better it works. Produce from your inventory does the job too, just weaker: flowers and herbs are low-grade, fruits and vegetables sit in the middle. Fertilizing doesn't make plants grow faster. It makes them jump quality faster, which is the part that pays. The effect lasts about 3 to 4 days before you can reapply. If you have Seasons, a bee box within five squares of your crops gives a passive fertilize boost that stacks with the real thing, and the honey sells well on the side.

Neglect has consequences. A plant choking in weeds or bone dry stops growing, slides backward, and eventually dies. Bringing a dead plant back costs a fee, so it's cheaper to just weed the thing. Too busy? Hire a gardener from the phone and let them handle the watering and spraying while your Sim is at work.

Small perk worth knowing: eating Perfect produce raw gives a +3 Happy moodlet for four hours. Keep a few high-quality fruits in your Sim's inventory as a pocket pick-me-up before work or a skill grind.

Grafting Compatible Plants

Grafting unlocks at gardening level 5, and it's how you get plants that never show up in seed packets. The flow is simple. Click a plant and Take Cutting, which drops a spliced garden shoot into your Sim's inventory. Then click a second plant, choose Graft, and pick that shoot. Two warnings before you start: the donor plant needs to be somewhat grown, and taking cuttings from the same plant twice in a row can kill it.

Every combo works in both directions, so it doesn't matter which plant donates and which receives. One fiddly rule does matter. The base plant, the type listed first on a grafted plant, decides what a cutting produces and what a graft spits out. Everything else hanging off that plant is along for the ride.

Here's the full recipe list for the base game:

| Cutting from | Graft onto | You get | |---|---|---| | Basil | Sage | Parsley | | Bluebell | Strawberry | Grape | | Pear | Lemon | Plantain | | Tulip | Chrysanthemum | Bird of Paradise | | Daisy | Strawberry | Bonsai Buds | | Rose | Grape | Bonsai Buds | | Snapdragon | Strawberry | Dragonfruit | | Dragonfruit | Snapdragon | Cow Berry | | Cherry | Apple | Pomegranate | | Lily | Snapdragon | Orchid | | Pomegranate | Orchid | Death Flower |

The first three make commons you could buy anyway, so treat them as curiosities. The rest are the rarities. The Death Flower chain is the famous one: graft Cherry onto Apple for a Pomegranate, graft Lily onto Snapdragon for an Orchid, then graft Pomegranate onto Orchid. Boom, Death Flowers forever. They're worth 240 simoleons each, they're an ingredient in Ambrosia, and if another Sim hands one to the Grim Reaper while he's collecting a soul, he'll bring the dying Sim back instead.

The sneaky-valuable part is quality inheritance. A grafted plant's new harvests come out at the base plant's quality. So if you've spent weeks evolving a Snapdragon up to Perfect and then graft a wild cutting onto it, the new produce arrives Perfect too. That trick skips four whole evolution levels and is the fastest known route to a Perfect Dragonfruit bush.

A few rules of thumb keep grafts from becoming a mess:

• Cap it at two or three plant types on one host. Past that, each harvest is a random grab bag, maybe one of this, zero of that. Total yield doesn't go up either.
• Graft slow, expensive plants onto fast growers. A Blackberry takes 96 hours on its own, but grafted onto a Tomato, which cycles in 24, it produces way more often.
• Mushrooms are the one family that can't be cut or grafted at all. Don't bang your head on that one.
• Trees grow slowly, so they make bad hosts for anything.

With Seasons, grafting solves the calendar problem too. Sage grows all year, so grafting a seasonal crop onto Sage keeps that harvest trickling in through every month.

Last data point: a correct combo also gives each future harvest a small chance to pop the spliced plant directly. The in-game weighting runs roughly 500 for commons, 100 for uncommons, and 1 for rares, which works out to about one rare per 600 harvestables. Nice when it happens, just don't build your plans around it.

Finding Rare Seeds and Cuttings

You've got three ways to collect the rare stuff, and they suit different stages of the game.

Rare seed packets show up at level 10 and cost 1,000 simoleons each, whether you buy from a computer or Build Mode. Each one pulls a single random item from the rare pool: Bird of Paradise, Bonsai Buds, Cow Berry, Death Flower, Dragonfruit, Growfruit, Orchid, Pomegranate, Trash Fruit, U.F.O., or a Magic Bean. Duplicates are just part of the deal. Growfruit hunters have burned 50 packets and pulled nine, so treat these as a convenience, not a strategy. The Magic Beans aren't junk either. Collect all six, plant them in the Magic PlantSim Stump from Build Mode, and a portal tree grows. Go through it, come back with the Forbidden Fruit, eat it, and your Sim becomes a PlantSim for five days.

Uncommon packets unlock way earlier, at level 7, and cost a fraction of the price. They cover Blackberry, Bonsai Buds, Cherry, Lily, Rose, Tomato, Trash Fruit, and a few pack-specific crops. For most of the mid-game, these plus grafting are all you need.

The free route is wild plants, and it's honestly the best one. Two rules make it work. First, plants only grow in the neighborhood your Sim is currently visiting, so if you show up and everything's unripe, you have to hang around. Fish, dig up rocks, chat with locals, and check back. Second, an unripe plant can still be cut once it's grown a little, so Take Cutting works even when there's nothing to harvest yet. Drag that cutting home, graft it, and you've captured the species.

The reliable wild spots, all pinned by community guides:

• Snapdragon: the Garden Essence home, the BFF household's place in Willow Creek. Strawberry and Potato grow there too, so one trip nets three plants.
• Lily: the park in Willow Creek, also in front of Oakenstead.
• Cherry: behind the park by Springscape in Oasis Springs.
• Tulip: down the hill behind Landgraab Mansion, near the abandoned mine.
• Tomato: the planter boxes up the road from Slipshod Mesquite.
• Sage and Lemon: around Oasis Springs by the Museum and across from Rattlesnake Juice.
• Blackberry: near the dirt path beside the big park in Oasis Springs.

A few plants ignore all of that and come from odd places. Trash Fruit grows from, well, trash: start taking out the garbage, cancel the interaction, and leave the bag sitting in the yard until it turns into a very sad trash plant. Water it and stay on top of its care and it'll eventually climb to Perfect, which is funny, because the fruit sells for one simoleon. Do it for the collection, not the cash. The U.F.O. plant, officially an Intergalactic Growth Pod, comes from rocket ship missions or rare packets. It never needs water, just weeding. Cow Berries show up fishing the glimmering stream with the cave in Oasis Springs' big park, in Sylvan Glade's larger pond, and on rocket missions, though grafting Dragonfruit onto Snapdragon gets you there way cheaper.

Selling Produce for Profit

Cashing out takes three forms. Early on, open your Sim's inventory and drag produce onto the simoleon icon in the corner. Later, you can click a plant and sell straight from it without touching the inventory at all. And at level 8, Super Sell clears every harvestable in the garden in a couple of clicks, which is the only sane way to handle a 30-plant operation.

Base sale values for the plants worth growing, at Normal quality:

| Plant | Sells for | Notes | |---|---|---| | Dragonfruit | 250 | Fall crop, slow at 96h to mature | | Death Flower | 240 | Winter crop | | Orchid | 225 | Spring and winter | | Cow Berry | 180 | All year, 24h cycle | | U.F.O. | 120 | Fall, slowest plant in the game at 112h | | Bird of Paradise | 51 | Spring and summer | | Lily | 36 | Uncommon, summer | | Bonsai Buds | 35 | All year, quick 24h cycle | | Rose | 29 | Uncommon | | Snapdragon | 16 | Common, and your grafting workhorse |

Quality stacks on top of every one of those numbers. A Perfect harvest sells for a few times the base price, so the real money is in rare plants that you've evolved to the top of the ladder, not rare plants fresh out of the ground.

Quick math on why this scales: a mature plant holds 4 to 6 harvestables. Ten Dragonfruit plants at Normal quality is 40 to 50 fruit per cycle, so call it 10,000 to 12,500 simoleons per cycle before any quality bonus, from plants you planted once and never paid for again. Push those to Perfect and the same cycle funds a mansion wing.

Don't chase the rarity tag by itself. Blackberry is technically rare, takes 96 hours to mature, and sells for 3 simoleons, which is a joke. Meanwhile Snapdragon, a common you can cut for free in Willow Creek, sells for 16 and doubles as the host for the two best grafts in the game. Read the table, not the label.

The strongest opening for a new household is cheap and fast. Walk to the BFF household's garden in Willow Creek, cut a Snapdragon and grab a Strawberry, graft them together, and you've got Dragonfruit, the single most valuable crop in the game, before your Sim has earned their first 1,000 simoleons. Evolve that bush every time it sparkles, re-graft cuttings onto more Snapdragons to spread the field, and fertilize with every decent fish you catch.

One more angle if you like variety: a microscope. It costs 1,630 simoleons, but Take Microscope Sample on any plant, analyze it, and you'll get prints that sell for hundreds while your Sim builds Logic. It turns a boring harvest day into a second income stream with the same crops.

Start with the Snapdragon run. It's free, it takes about ten minutes of game time, and it converts two weeds-adjacent flowers into a plant that out-earns most entry-level careers.