Master Your Tales of the Shire Garden: Easy Tips for a Bountiful Harvest
Gardening in Tales of the Shire isn’t just a fun activity—it’s essential for any true Hobbit wanting to enjoy fresh fruits, veggies, and rare ingredients you can’t find in the wild or buy from shops. If you want to master your garden in Bywater, just planting seeds won’t cut it. You’ll need to water your plants and pair them with the right companions to get the best harvest.
- How to get seeds and garden beds
- Planting and growing basics
- Watering tips for faster growth
- Companion planting for tastier crops
- Expanding your garden and leveling up
Getting Started: Seeds and Garden Beds
The first step is getting your hands on seeds. You’ll receive random seeds by completing quests (called tales), but you can also buy them from Farmer Cotton at the Village Square, just north of your Hobbit-hole. His stock changes with the seasons, so it’s smart to collect a variety of seeds to prepare different dishes and satisfy your Hobbit neighbors.
You don’t have to worry about garden beds at the start because your Hobbit-hole comes with a few already planted near your front door. Later, you can buy more beds from Farmer Cotton if you want to expand.
Planting and Growing Your Garden
Stand in your garden and open the Home Decoration menu (hold “H” on keyboard or press the map button on a controller). Then, open your storage and select the “garden” category to access your seeds and beds. Choose the seeds you want to plant and place them in the garden beds—corners are great spots to fit more plants.
After planting, all you need is patience. Most plants take about three days to grow before you can harvest them. You can speed things up by watering and planting compatible crops next to each other.
How to Tell Which Plants You Can Grow
Check your encyclopedia to see if an ingredient is garden-grown or forageable. If it shows a preferred season only, it’s foraged. But if it lists companion preferences and more info, it’s a garden plant. For example, strawberries are garden plants while others might be forageable.
Watering Your Plants
To make your plants grow faster, grab your watering can from the tool menu (press ‘T’ on keyboard or Up on the D-pad). Fill it up at the nearby stream and water every garden bed once a day. While watering isn’t required since gardening can’t fail, it helps your crops mature quicker.
Companion Planting: Boost Deliciousness
Each fruit or vegetable has a deliciousness rating marked by stars. The higher the rating, the better the taste and value. To increase your chances of a tasty harvest, plant crops that like each other side by side. Open your encyclopedia and check the “happy face” section for plants that boost each other, and avoid those in the “angry face” section that don’t get along.
For example, beans like to grow next to baby marrow, brown taters, and maize but don’t do well near shallots.
Expanding Your Garden and Leveling Up
When you start a new game, four sections of your garden are locked. To unlock them, you need to improve your gardening level. This becomes possible after joining the Gardening Club, which you unlock during the Bywater Village Campaign Tale (the main quest).
Gardening itself will raise your level, but you can speed things up by completing extra gardening missions available on the mission board in the Village Square.
