Gardening Guide

There are a lot of skills that your sims can learn in the base game such as painting, cooking, and more. One of the skills that you can learn is Gardening, and this feature has been improved upon in the Sims 4: Seasons expansion. Gardening works well with the new Gardener career as you reach your way to become a Botanist or a Floral Designer.

In this guide, we’ll be checking the basics of gardening, what the Seasons provide for Gardening, and what plants you can grow and eventually harvest. The Gardening skill can help you earn a lot of money, and the interactions that you get from different types of plants can be quite enjoyable as well!

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What is Gardening?

The gardening skill lets your sim plant seeds, grow then to plants, and then eventually harvest them or make use of the plant. Before the Seasons expansion, Gardening was quite different since plant quality levels were more tedious. With Seasons, the Gardening skill has been revamped and this has been added to the base game as well.



You can now water plants easier and less often, then you’ll be able to get plant quality up to 5 instead of longer levels, and you can also sell them easily. The benefits of Gardening let you create quality plants that can be sold, or perhaps you can grow plants that can be used for specific dishes if you’re aiming to cook at the same time.

Gardening has a lot of features since different processes are involved such as providing fertilizer to your plants. Some plants in the game can also evolve and be grafted, so let’s check what we can expect from this skill.

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Gardening Skills

Much like other skills in the game, specific actions that you do with your Sims will unlock a skill and then repeating different actions will help improve it. For Gardening, you’ll start with planting seeds, watering, weeding, and harvesting. You can even trim plants that you purchase from build mode and they can help with the Gardening skill.

Once Gardening has been unlocked, you can also improve it by checking books related to gardening. Here are the skills that you can gain from improving your gardening skills.





Gardening Skill Cheat: If you want to skip leveling up your gardening skills, you can use the game’s cheat mode by turning testing cheats on through the cheat console. You can then input the following cheat.

stats.set_skill_level major_gardening x

You can replace x with the skill level up to 10. You can check more about cheats by checking the following pages that we have created:

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Gardener Traits and Aspirations

Combining your Gardening skill with a Gardener career can easily be improved if you have chosen good traits for your Sims. Combining this with an aspiration that is related to gardening will also help you attain them! Here’s the list of traits and aspirations that are suitable.

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Gardening Process

So how does the gardening process work in terms of your skill, is there a step-by-step process that you need to do in order to be successful? When combining the gardening skill with your career, following a routine can help you out with how you let your Sim do their work. Since gardeners can work from home, trying to be efficient with your time can help you out.

Here is a summary of the different steps you’ll be doing with gardening. You can follow this as a guideline on how you can go about your usual day.

Purchasing Seeds: In order to grow plants, you’ll have to start from the beginning and acquire some seeds for your garden. You can purchase seeds through your computer and order there, you can click your garden pots to bring up a menu. Starter packs can be purchased and there are seasonal variants as well, and later on once you maximize your skill, you’ll be able to get rare seed packets.

Planting your Seeds: Once you have your seeds, you’ll then plant them on the ground, or on pots and planters. When you purchase a packet, you can open them up on your inventory, and then you can drag and drop each seed on the soil. Once they have been planted, you can then water them, fertilize them, and perhaps research if you’re a Gardener.

Increasing your Plant’s quality: By tending to your plants, you can continue watering and fertilizing them in order to increase their quality. You’ll have to manage weeds, and check on each individual plant if their needs are met. If you neglect their needs, then the plant can die. Increasing your plant’s quality can help with providing the Requirements for your plant to grow into a new type.

Evolving your Plant: With continued care, your plants can eventually get an option where you can evolve them. In doing so, you’ll get higher quality plants which will provide you with better items for harvest. With continued quality increases, you’ll be able to sell your plants at higher profits.

Managing Pests: Every now and then, you’ll notice that there may be bugs circling around your plant. This will then provide you with the option to spray for bugs. If you leave pests alone, then they can cause havoc and kill your plants eventually.

Harvesting: Once your plants have grown, you’ll eventually be able to get the option of harvesting. One of ways to level up your gardening skill is to harvest harvestables, so having a steady supply of seeds that you plant will be vital in order for you to get a supply of plants coming in.

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Effects of Seasons

With the Seasons expansion, the change of weather patterns can now affect the plants that you grow. For example, some plants cannot grow during the winter season therefore you’ll have to take this into account. Whenever a plant isn’t growing due to the season, it will lie dormant much like how real plants behave.



There are some plants as well that can grow during a specific season, but they cannot be harvested until later. All of these added elements provide depth to your gardening gameplay. You can create your garden in a specific schedule where you can rotate different types of plants to grow according to the upcoming Weather. You’ll be able to prepare your plants in advance if you have the correct seed packets, and if you know which plants grow in specific seasons.

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List of Plants

There are different plants that you can grow once you have the Seasons expansion. Thanks to the gardening skill, you’ll be able to level up and unlock more types of seed packets that can provide better types of plants. Some plants can be grafted in order to make a new plant, and there are also plants that you can obtain in specific location.

The list below provides you with the different plants that you can acquire as well as their seasonal harvest periods.



We hope that this Gardening Guide has provided you with the basic information on how the Gardening skill has been updated for the Sims 4: Seasons. We have prepared other guides as well in our pages so please check other ones such as Weather-related changes below:

Weather Guide

If you have any other tips or tricks that you’d like to share with us, please don’t hesitate by providing us with a comment below, we’d love to hear from you as well!