FFXIV Gardening Guide: How to Grow Crops in Final Fantasy XIV

while farming in an MMO makes most people think of XP and gold, it has a slightly different meaning in Final Fantasy XIV. amongst the plethora of things to do in Final Fantasy XIV, you can also grow crops as well. Not only can you grow food items to use in your culinary crafting, but you can grow elemental shards too which can help fund your crafting exploits. Just like real farming, it’s not as simple as digging a hole and planting a seed. let’s go over how you can grow crops in Final Fantasy XIV.

How to Grow Crops in Final Fantasy XIV

Before you can start growing crops in Final Fantasy XIV you will need to have access to a housing plot, either personal or through your Free Company. If you are using your Free Company’s house plot, you will need to be able to place external furniture and interact with it. If you are lucky enough to win the housing lottery and buy a housing plot of your own you just need to buy a garden plot from the market board or craft one for yourself.

After you place the garden plot outside, you will need to either buy or farm yourself some seeds and topsoil to use with the garden. Buying the soil and seeds from the market is not super expensive but if you are trying to save as much Gil as possible, you will need a Botanist job to go farm the seeds and topsoil yourself.

To plant your seeds, you will need to interact with one of the empty slots on the garden plot, a basic plot should have eight slots for plants to be grown in. Each slot needs both seed and topsoil to be used on it in order to grow anything. The quality of topsoil you use will improve the number of crops that you harvest when the seed is fully grown.

After you plant the crop you can’t just leave it and come back for it later, if you do this it will die. You will need to tend the crop at least once in order for it to fully grow. The amount of time needed for a crop to fully grow can vary from 12 hours to 10 days. A good rule of thumb is to tend your crops at least once a day to make sure that they will fully grow.

You can also use fertilizer in order to decrease the amount of time needed for the crop to fully grow. You can apply up to 10 pieces of fertilizer to a crop and the grow time taken off the crop’s total time needed varies depending on the crop. For example, putting one fertilizer on a 12-hour crop will remove 7 minutes from the time needed for it to fully grow, while applying one fertilizer to a 10-day crop will remove 2 hours and 23 minutes.

For any crop that takes a day or less to grow, it really isn’t worth using any fertilizer on it unless you desperately need whatever the crop produces. But using 10 fertilizers on the 2-day or more crops will drastically reduce the time needed for them to grow and should be done if you are able to do so. If you need any more help with Final Fantasy XIV make sure to check out our other guides.

Final Fantasy XIV is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Mac, and PC.