If you choose to take up FFXIV gardening, you are sure to benefit from many advantages. In order to get the most out of these perks in FFXIV, you will want to get a better idea of what exactly you can gain from gardening, and how you actually do it. There are a few things you need to know before starting.

With that being said, the following guide will discuss:

• Why you should be gardening
• Getting started
• The Basics
• Crossbreeding

To start off, let’s take a look at what the benefits are from gardening.

Why You Should be Gardening in FFXIV

So if you are looking into gardening in FFXIV, here’s a few of the benefits. You can use gardening to increase your Gil, plus you can get certain crafting mats that can only be made through gardening. This is something that you will need to implement crossbreeding, which we will be discussing later on in this guide.

On the subject of these crafting mats, they can be used for a number of things such as housing items, mounts, minions and more. You can use them for getting shards too, and even items to feed Chocobos. Some can even be used to change the colour of your Chocobo, if you choose to do so.

It can be costly to set up at times when it comes to gardening, but it can be a great investment. You can make a decent amount of coin by selling deluxe crops and more. But in order to do this, you are going to need to know how to get started.

Getting Started

To begin, you are going to need to purchase a garden patch in The Mist from one of the Housing Merchants, Lavender Beds, The Goblet and Shirogane. You can then place them on the estate grounds once you have done so. You will find that there are three different garden patches, which include Round, Oblong, and Deluxe. A Round garden patch has four garden beds, whilst an Oblong has six, and a Deluxe has eight.

There are a couple of other items that you are going to need to get started. Firstly, you will need to get seeds, which can be collected by botanists. They will also appear in certain areas from time to time where crops are yielded. You will also need soil, which you can be found by miners. The soil that you gather will depend on the region that you got it from, and will often differ in the quality and quantity that you get.

The Basics of FFXIV Gardening

To start with, you are going to need to select a garden bed. After that, select a bag of seeds and the soil you want to use to get started with your planting. As mentioned, different soils are going to have different effects, so keep that in mind. You then need to look into raising your crops, so you will have to make sure you are constantly tending them, plus using fertilizer. How fast your plants grow and how many actually grow will depend on the soil that you use.

For example, Fertilizing crops will enrich the soil, therefore speeding up the growth. You can buy Fishmeal fertilizer from the housing zones with the Material Supplier. Alternatively, you can have a Culinarian craft it for you. It’s worth keeping in mind that you can only apply this once an hour, too. You can also tend crops, which involves taking care of and watering your plants. This is something that you need to keep up with, otherwise they will begin to wither away and die. If it rains, your character wont water your crops since they won’t need it, but rather it will be tended to instead. Then of course the other option is to remove crops, which will take your crop out of its bed.

Then there’s harvesting crops. Once a plant has fully grown, you can harvest the crops to get produce. Depending on the quality and the quantity of their growth, you can obtain some high quality produce that can be used for a variety of different uses that we discussed earlier.

Crossbreeding

Finally, we have Crossbreeding. This is what a lot of players will find the most interesting about gardening. Effectively, the practice of Crossbreeding is a way of getting a seed that you wouldn’t have been able to get before. It allows you to plant seeds then get new ones such as Chive, Blood Pepper, Royal Fern and others. You can also find crossbred seeds sometimes from the plant itself once it has been harvested.

Most of the time, you can just use a single garden patch to crossbreed a certain seed. Crossbreeding will take place when you plant the seed, so keep in mind that a seed will not make a crossbred seed if it has been planted first.

Conclusion

So as you can see, there are a few benefits for you to take away when it comes to gardening in FFXIV. There may be a fair bit of work to do in order for you to make the most out of it, but it is certainly a worthy investment. Looking after your plants will take time and care, and as you will have read there are different ways of looking after them depending on what you have on you and the plants that you have decided to grow.

FFXIV gardening on the whole is something that you will need to invest in. Not just currency wise, but also time. Many will say that there is a hefty amount of coin that has to go into gardening if you choose to, but there is a lot that you can get out of doing so. If making gil, new items and much more is something that appeals to you, then be sure to set some time aside to do a spot of gardening in FFXIV.