Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life, SE - Crops, Trees and Fertilizer Guide

The basic mechanics of growing crops is that you buy the seeds, till soil using the hoe, plant the seeds then use a full watering can with them to water them. How often you water them depends on the season. 

Crops, trees and general planting:

You’ll be given everything you need to start growing crops but only with two tomato seeds that can be found in your tool shed on the shelf. To get more you need to buy the seeds from Vesta’s farm, just over the river. You should check the chart below to see which crops grow in which seasons, if you plant something in the wrong season they’ll just end up dying after a couple of days. 

 Once you’ve bought what you want to plant you’ll want to go back to your farm and use your hoe with the untilled soil to prepare the land for the seeds to be put in. After you’ve planted your seeds you should fill your watering can up at the small fountain next to the chicken coop and then water them all. You’ll notice the colour of the soil changes to darker when it has been watered. This soil will slowly get lighter and lighter as the water wears off. Like your animals, crops are best watered twice a day, morning and evening to stop them from dying. That’s not to say you should be watering your animals, just that both tend to require care twice a day. There is nothing worse than waking up to find all your crops have wilted and this is a particular problem in summer.

Crop:	Type of crop:	Seasons:	Cost to buy:	Appearance:
Tomatoes	Vine	Spring - Fall	30g
Strawberries	Vine	Fall - Spring	30G
Melons	Vine	Summer - Fall	50G
Watermelons	Vine	Spring - Summer	60G
Turnips	Root	Summer - Winter	20G
Yams	Root	Fall	40G
Potatoes	Root	Winter - Spring	40G
Carrots	Root	Fall - Winter	30G

Tree:	Season to harvest:	Cost to buy:	Appearance
Banana	Summer	280G
Peach	Summer	180Gg
Orange	Summer	140G
Apple	Fall	140G
Grape	Fall	160G

At first, there are only a few different varieties but this will soon change. By the second chapter you will be able to create hybrid crops and trees which is when you merge together two different things into a totally new one. This can happen in generations whereas generation two would look like: tomato + potato = X and generation three would be like, X + Y = Z where it’s two generation two crops. Still with me? Fabulous. Let’s start with the basics though so I don’t confuse myself. You’ll notice that there are two different kinds of thing you can plant; trees and crops. Trees take a lot longer to grow, around a year, and only bear fruit in one season. Crops meanwhile take between 5 to 10 days to grow with some quicker than others, turnips for instance, only take between 4 to 5 days from being planted to being harvested. 

The easiest way to hoe, plant and water crops is in a particular pattern which means you have minimal moving to do. This is optional, but a lot of people do it. See diagram below:

--------
-x-x-x-
--x-x--
-x-x-x-
--x-x--
--------
X = Crop
- = Unused ground

By planting crops in this sort of chess board like pattern it means you can stand in the middle and swivel. That’s the best way I can describe it. By putting them alongside each other then you kind of have to be very precise and slow with your walking and it’s hard to get the middle crops. But, like I say, this is just a little thing a lot of people do, it’s not in the ‘you must do it this way or else everything will be DEAD when you wake up’ list. Trees are in that list. Trees must be planted with enough room around them otherwise they get all crowded and will die, just like in real life, things which don’t get enough sunlight are going to be stunted due to all the bigger plants around them and eventually die. So, planting trees is another pattern, one which goes like this:

---------
-x-x-x-x-
---------
-x-x-x-x-
---------
-x-x-x-x
---------
X = Tree
- = Unused ground

At the beginning we have only five kinds of tree available to us but you can plant as many as you like as you see fit. I tend to leave space empty for when I get around to hybridizing but you don’t have to; by that point you’ll be close to getting something called ‘the grand field’ which is a very large area of ground to plant as much as you like in it. I tend to buy one of each tree though not all at once as they are rather expensive when you have only 3000G.

Crops and trees take a bit of effort but they will serve you well and, as well as being the foundation for your future hybrids, will feature in your cooking. Besides, we’re playing the game now so we may as well do everything it has to offer. Below you can see the costs of each grade of produce and seed for both trees and crops should you choose to sell your produce/seeds. I will be discussing how to raise something from B grade to S grade in the Fertilizer section below.

	B grade crop	B grade seed	A grade crop	A grade seed	S grade crop	S grade seed
Tomatoes	35G	15G	45G	25G	55G	35G
Strawberries	35G	15G	45G	25G	55G	35G
Melons	70G	25G	80G	35G	90G	45G
Watermelons	75G	30G	85G	40G	95G	50G
Turnips	25G	10G	35G	20G	45G	30G
Yams	60G	20G	70G	30G	80G	40G
Potatoes	60G	20G	70G	30G	80G	40G
Carrots	45G	15G	55G	25G	65G	35G

	B grade fruit	B grade seed	A grade fruit	A grade seed	S grade fruit	S grade seed
Banana	25G	750G	35G	760G	45G	770G
Peach	40G	560G	50G	570G	60G	580G
Orange	30G	410G	40G	420G	50G	430G
Apple	25G	410G	35G	420G	45G	430G
Grape	35G	450G	45G	460G	55G	470G

Fertilizer
 
In the very first chart of this guide which includes the season of crops you’ll see I also put what it costs to buy the seeds from Vesta’s farm. When you buy them they will always be at ‘B grade’ which you’ll be familiar with from all our talk of different grade dairy products above. Since these are the lowest grade available you’re probably wondering how you improve the crop or seed and, I imagine, you’ve already guessed fertilizer. Well you’re right, but it’s going to take a lot more than just one application of the stuff.
 
You can put fertilizer on your crops, trees and pasture. Putting fertilizer on the pasture is extremely important and you should put a little on there on the first day of Spring as it also gives your cow something to eat. Animals preferring eating the grass outside and it seems to increase the quality of your cow’s milk a lot faster than feeding them fodder indoors. When you put fertilizer on your trees and crops you’ll notice that three large triangles appear. This just indicates that that crop is fertilized; the triangles will shrink over several hours until they are completely disappeared. When they have disappeared you can put more fertilizer on to add towards improving the crop to A or S grade.

Note: If you try and put more than 1 fertilizer on something straight away before the triangles have disappeared a talking roach will call to you and tell you not to do that. He’ll then burrow back into the ground. No, really.

Fertilizer costs 40G each, which is a major improvement on what it cost in the GameCube version, but you’ll need to put roughly 2 applications of fertilizer on every crop, every day for the duration of its growth period. This sounds like a lot, and it is, but this is guaranteed to get the crop up to S grade and completely bypasses A grade. All in all, you’ll be losing a lot of money if you fertilize a crop up to S grade then sell that S grade crop, even to Van, but that’s not what we’ll be doing.

Seed maker, extended explanation:

Earlier when I was talking about upgrades and stuff I mentioned a seed maker. This is where that thing comes in handy. First of all, I'll just tell you this; you can obtain the seed maker for free if you befriend Daryl in chapter 1 AND don't talk to Takakura until you have the thing. By talking to Takakura prior to getting it for free from Daryl you'll have to pay 15,000G for it and will be locked out from getting it as a gift. After befriending Daryl you must enter his lab when he is in there, sometime after noon.

WIth that out the way, I'll explain how it works. You’ll notice that under each crop you put into the machine there’s three dots with the first one lit up as orange. This is the current processing stage. It takes 3 days for the crop to be turned into a seed and each day another light will come on. You can put any fruit or vegetable into the seed maker to turn it into seeds but once you put something inside it you cannot take it back out again.
 
The most efficient way to use the seed maker is to fertilize crops up to S grade, harvest them, then put those S grade vegetables into the seed maker. When it’s gone through the processing process you’ll receive 2 S grade seeds for every S grade fruit or vegetable you put in there. This means you spend less money on fertilizer as, just by harvesting 2 S grade crops, you’ll essentially get 4 seeds out of it, which will be turned into 8, 16, and so on without any need for additional fertilizer. Of course, this will take time as they take a little while to grow and can’t be planted in every season without the help of a particular flower (in Chapter 2 onwards). To speed things up, I fertilize 3 of each different type of crop up to S rank and then, with the 6 new seeds, I’ll just plant them as normal whenever the season is right. Remember to not sell all your seeds or S rank crops though as you need enough to keep the process going.

Fertilizer maker: Another extension you can buy from the ledger is fertilizer maker for 15,000G. This would have been a useful addition to the farm if fertilizer was as expensive in this game as it was in the GameCube version, but it’s not, it’s only 40G each. A fertilizer maker attaches onto that bin in your barn and sits just outside, near the pasture. To use it you put flowers in the bin in your barn and then collect the fertilizer by going outside and using the sort of ‘collection bin’. It produces it straight away, it doesn’t need to decay, but the process of putting flowers in one by one and then taking fertilizer out one by one can be very time consuming. Ignoring the fact you also need a large supply of flowers to even begin this, which takes even more time. A benefit of having this fertilizer maker is if Vesta’s is shut, like on a Van day, then you won’t have to wait until the next day to get some fertilizer. It also means you don’t have to travel as far and, yes technically it is cheaper. A flower is worth around 10G if you use the cheap ones and fertilizer is 40G but it’s down to you to decide if the time spent using the thing is worth the small price reduction. Just a guess, but if you’ve got the money to splash out on one of these you’re probably not counting your pennies.
 
Fertilizing trees however is on an entirely different playing field as they are seriously fertilizer hungry plants. To bump a tree up from B grade to A grade takes, approximately, 30 fertilizer. You don’t need me to tell you that that’s a lot of money, especially if you want all your trees at S grade. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to you. You’ll have noticed that the cost of seeds is worth a significant amount more than the fruit themselves and due to this I’d recommend turning your tree fruit into seeds to sell on, rather than depend on the fruit themselves. If you want to keep fruit for recipes or gifts, go ahead, it's not all about the money.