A crop plot costs six wood and a measure of seed. Stand on it with seed in your pack and press E to sow; press it again when the crop is ready and you cut it — and get the seed back, so a farm feeds itself after the first sowing. Buy that first measure from the Merchant.
It ripens on the clock, whether you are logged in or not, and how fast depends on the ground: open green ground grows grain, forest floor does badly, and rock, sand and snow do nothing at all. You can see how far along a crop is — a plot wears bare tilled earth, then sown ground, a sprout, a half-grown crop, and finally the full-grown picture, which appears only when it is genuinely ready to cut.
Besides the two grains the Merchant sells seed for four garden crops, and they are not four versions of each other — each wants different ground, so where you put a field is a reading of the land:
| Crop | Ground | Ripens | Yield |
|---|---|---|---|
| Potatoes | will come up in ground that would starve anything else | 13 min | 5 |
| Carrots | most ordinary ground, and quickly | 10 min | 4 |
| Corn | decent ground, and it takes its time | 25 min | 3 |
| Tomatoes | the best soil in the valley and nothing less | 18 min | 4 |
A hoe and a bucket
The Merchant sells a hoe (55 coins). Hold it, stand where you want a bed and press E — the ground is tilled, for nothing. A crop plot can still be built from the catalogue for six wood; the hoe is the other way, paid for once instead of every time. Everything else is the same: your own land, the same room in the quarter, the same refusals.
And a bucket (30 coins). Fill it at the village well, or at any open water — a river, a lake, anywhere deep enough to fish — and empty it on a bed you have sown. A watered bed comes on faster while the ground stays wet, about six minutes, and it looks wet, so you can see from across a field which rows you have done. The bucket comes back empty; walk to the water again.
The ground wears out
Cutting a crop takes something out of the soil, and the soil puts it back on its own if you leave it alone — about an hour and a half from worked out to fresh again. Corn is a heavy feeder, carrots are a light one, and a plot tells you its condition every time you look at it: in good heart, a little tired, tired, worn thin, worked out. A tired bed greys off, so you can see which of your fields needs resting from across the valley.
What makes that interesting is the table above. As ground wears it drops off the bottom of that list one crop at a time: tomatoes give up first, then corn, then carrots, and potatoes keep going longest. An exhausted field is potato country. How far it falls depends on where you started — the best valley floor worked to nothing will still grow carrots, and ordinary good ground will not.
All four are edible raw and barely worth it — the point of a vegetable is what the campfire does with it. Four of any of them make a root stew; three and a flatbread make a field pie.