Disney Dreamlight Valley - Gardening

This is part of our series of beginner tips for Disney Dreamlight Valley. We won't do a hand-holding walkthrough here, but instead consider approaches that might be unusual or overlooked.

Gardening

• Where to Garden - Initially, don't worry too much about the preferred biome for growing plants faster.
• It's overall better to have one convenient huge farming plot where you can sow seeds and harvest efficiently.
• You are probably not going to time each harvest and instead go off doing other stuff until you need to water the plants or harvest them.
• Map view shows you when crops need watering or are ready for harvest. Cotton ready for harvesting does NOT show in Map view.
• For this reason we recommend clearing an early section of Peaceful Meadow for 99+ plots.
• 99 because when you buy seeds, if you click "-" right away for quantity, it inputs the maximum amount you can buy at one time, which is 99 seeds.
• It's fairly easy to position yourself to water a 2x3 block of farming plots.
• Make a few extra plots in case you collect a few seeds along the way or need to plant something quick to do a Dreamlight Duty.
• At ruler level 40, a full gold bar of Energy is enough to plant 99x2 plots.
• Later when Dazzle Beach is available, you might want to use the east side as there's wide open space and you can place your Fruit trees and bushes there as well in long lanes for convenient harvesting (see picture below for a sample layout).
• The Glade of Trust has a very open space although for the same reason you may want to reserve it for constructing a thematic zone of your design. With the open space however you can quite easily pick up all bonus drops around your crop area without resorting to tricks like imprisoning your following Character to force all drops later when you release them (see video).

• If you are harvesting a lot and don't want to be interrupted by your following Character throwing out bonus items, box them in first so they can't follow you. They'll throw out the first bonus from harvesting but hold on to all the rest. In order to box in your companion easily and repeatedly:
• Place a teleporter nearby. Notice where you and your following Character land when you use it.
• Use fencing to box the area where your Character lands.
• Place someone's house (such as your own) nearby. You will use this to release your Character.
• When you are ready to harvest, use the teleport well. Your companion should land inside the fence box while you are free to roam. Do your harvesting.
• When you are done, walk into the house. Your Character will follow. Turn around and walk out.
• When you do this, be careful about immediately turning around. If the Character following doesn't move away from the entry pad, you might get stuck in exit animation because you are colliding with them. This issue seems to be fixed in v1.4
• After a brief time, your Character will walk toward where you were harvesting and throw out all the bonus items.
• IMPORTANT: If you harvest a LOT before releasing the companion, and there isn't a lot of empty space nearby to drop all the items, some bonus drops can get thrown very, very, far, making just as much of a mess you have to pick up manually later.
• They will NOT drop bonus items on farm plots, even empty ones.
• Pumpkins and cotton are especially troublesome because each unit takes up a lot of space on the ground compared to other crops. So if you have a huge field, you might want to split up pumpkin harvesting into two or three phases depending on available space.
• Notice that when Characters throw bonus items to you, they will not land right at your position but somewhere around you at the time of the throw. If you can position yourself where you can limit the valid spaces, you can "herd" all the drops.
• For example, if you stand right at the sea shore, the water is not a valid location so the drops will be roughly in a semi-circle around you on the beach. If there is clutter nearby, you'll have to navigate that clutter when you go pick up the drops, so try to stand in a clear area.
• NOTE: If you box in someone with a Stall (e.g., Goofy), they cannot run to the stall when you activate it, so it will time out and not open the Stall at all.
• Gardening for Profit - additional considerations
• Use this crops chart to help you decide.
• Many websites suggest you grow Pumpkins for maximum profit over time, but this really depends on how you are playing at the moment.
• A big field is better for longer-growing crops because you require more setup time planting and watering, and later harvesting.
• A conveniently shaped field is more efficient for gardening, and in many biomes you need various quests to unlock the ability to clear away terrain obstacles. That means crops will take even longer to grow that the chart indicates, if you are in another biome. E.g., Pumpkins.
• We recommend Peaceful Meadow or Dazzle Beach as the most convenient open spaces.
• If you want to focus on getting stuff done (i.e., questing and Duties) while your crops are growing, then you want something that produces a lot of profit and requires a lot of time to grow.
• Fewer iterations of planting and harvesting.
• While the crops are growing, you have uninterrupted time to run around and do stuff.
• Downside: These crops typically require that you water them several times. If you're lucky and it rains, that's great. Otherwise if they dry up, they stop growing.
• Recommendation: Pumpkin, but you will have to water them a total of two times. Check your map for watering status.
• If you want less hassle and just plant, water, and collect later then you probably want a crop that requires only watering once.
• For example, as the last thing you do before logging out so that you can collect it when you log back in later.
• Recommendation: Okra
• Alternatively, if you can leave the game open, you can wait for it to rain (and thus automatically water all crops) while you are away from the keyboard.
• If you want to farm memory fragments from Gardening, or level up Characters regardless of their Role, planting, watering, and harvesting a lot of crops is a great way to do it and make some profit.
• Planting seeds and watering crops don't get you extra crops, so having a Gardening Character with you won't help at all. You might as well use a Character you want to level up.
• Recommendation: Wheat, Lettuce, or Sugarcane, depending on the size of the field.
• You want something with a short grow time, so that by the time you have finished watering, the crops first watered will soon finish growing so you can repeat the cycle.

• Don't carry seeds while you are harvesting.
• Sometimes a crop (or fruit tree) will start to glow. You want to keep mashing your harvesting key to keep harvesting until that glow is gone. It is easy to over-click and end up planting a seed. There's no way to remove that seed.
• If you mis-click the location, you have to exit out of the planting dialog and that costs you time you should be harvesting the bonus crops while the plant has a golden glow.
• This causes a plot to be filled by a crop and that can cause the auto-planting to mess up. Auto-planting works best when you have long empty rows. With a nice rectangular plot that is initially empty, auto-planting can plant the entire plot. But if there are some filled spots, it can cause auto-planting to turn and then stop when it runs out of adjacent plots to fill. Then you have to re-start it. It's not that big a deal when you don't have a lot of plots but when you are trying to farm for money and have bit 11x9 plots, it can create a lot of extra work.
• Reserve a few plots somewhere and keep some quick-growing vegetables there, so you can conveniently do any Dreamlight Duties involving Planting or Harvesting Vegetables.
• For Harvesting, the counter tracks the yield, not the number of plants harvested. So if you need to Harvest 5, you just need to harvest 2 Tomato plants because the yield is 3 tomatoes per plant, so 2 x 3 = 6 and you only need 5.