Grow a Garden has blown up in popularity and rightly so, and it has also brought along millions of players. If you’re new to the game and are looking for a Grow a Garden beginners guide to get you started, this is for you. Here’s everything you need to know about getting seeds, growing crops, buying gear, pets, weather, and how to grow your in-game income fast.
Grow a Garden Beginner’s Guide
Starting with basic carrots, you’ll learn to navigate Sam’s Shop for seeds, unlock and use gear like sprinklers and watering cans, and optimize your farm layout. Dynamic weather—Rainy and Thunderstorms—triggers valuable mutations (Wet, Shocked), while rare mutations (Gold, Rainbow, Choc) multiply profits even further. Daily quests and friend bonuses provide free rewards like seed packs, and choosing the right crops for your garden will help increase your steady income.
HUD
On screen, the bottom left is where you will see your available cash. There are 3 buttons at the top and clicking on them teleports you to Sam’s Shop (seed seller), your Garden and and the Sell Stall.
Gameplay Loop
The gameplay of Grow a Garden is simple. You buy a seed from Sam’s shop, go to your garden, and find an area on your plot to plant it. You do this by opening the inventory (the hotbar at the bottom and the Bag at the top left are ways to access it) and equipping the seed in your character’s hand.
Wait for the plant to grow (every crop has its own growth time), and once it’s fully grown, it will bear fruit. For starters, you will be able to afford Carrot, and once you harvest it, you’ll see that the plant disappears. That’s because it’s a single-harvest plant. If you get something like a Strawberry, the plant remains in your garden and will bear fruit again after a period. This makes it a multi-harvest plant.
Overall, the garden grows offline so when you come back the next time, your garden will look different.
Sam’s Shop (Seed Shop)
The shop refreshes every five minutes, but it’s a game of ‘first come first serve’ where you must teleport to the location quickly to see what’s in stock. If you’re late, the seeds of higher rarities like Mythical and Divine will be snagged by other players.
Seed tiers: Common (fast, cheap), Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, Mythical, Divine (slowest, priciest, highest return).
Understanding Crops
Crop Categories
- Single-harvest: One-time yield (e.g., Carrot, Strawberry).
- Multi-harvest: Produces repeatedly over time (e.g., Blueberry, Corn).
Plan your garden layout beforehand because you will need some space for bigger trees in the near future, such as Coconut, Mango, Cactus etc.
- Early game: Stick to Common & Uncommon seeds for quick income.
- Mid game: Introduce Rare & Legendary seeds as cash collects.
- Late game: Invest in Mythical & Divine for maximum per-plant profit.
Harvesting Crops
Stand next to mature crops and press and hold E (keep holding for bulk harvest). Sometimes you might want to keep the fruit on the plant, because weather conditions like rain, thunderstorm, or frost end up mutating the fruit, increasing its value. For example, if a Coconut gets the Frozen mutation, its value gets boosted by 10x, getting you income much faster. The money in this game is called Sheckles.
A good trick to harvest fruits from tall plants (e.g., Coconut, Dragon Fruit) is to plant Bamboo beside them to climb and get to the top.
Weather
As of now, there are the following weather conditions that occur randomly in the game—Rain, Thunderstorm, Frost, Night, and Sheckle Rain. There’s also Blood Moon coming soon. Hover on the icon at the bottom right of the screen to see how it affects your crops.
Fruits can only get mutated if the weather conditions happened while you were online.
Tools and Gear
The gear shop is located at the opposite end of the seed shop and has various tools that help boost your garden:
- Watering Can (50 K cash, 10 uses): Speeds growth.
- Basic Sprinkler (20 K cash, 5 min): Increases growth speed.
- Advanced Sprinkler (50 K cash, 5 min): Boosts mutation chances.
- Godly Sprinkler (100 K cash, 5 min): Maximizes both growth and mutations and more!
- This is also where you can look for daily quests and when you complete them, you get a Seed Pack for free.
Selling and Gifting
- Sell Stall: Stand by it, press E to talk to the NPC and click on ‘Sell your inventory’ to sell off everything and collect cash. If you don’t want to sell a particular fruit, favorite it beforehand.
- Gifting: Share fruits with friends or neighbouring players for bonus rewards and XP. Each friend in your garden grants a 10% cash boost on all sales.
Garden Layout Tips
- Cluster multi-harvest plots tightly. This helps when you place a sprinkler that covers multiple high-value crops.
- Allocate separate zones for large, single-harvest crops to avoid wasted space.
- Make sure to keep an area for event-based exclusive seeds because the become even more valuable after the event ends.
- Remove low-tier crops with a Shovel once your garden becomes more valuable and has higher tier crops. This frees up space for more high tier seeds.
Pets
Here’s what pets do in Grow a Garden. There are tiers for pets as well and the eggs can be purchased from the shop next to the Gear shop. It restocks with mostly Common, Uncommon and Rare eggs but can have Legendary and Exotic eggs sometimes, and they are the priciest ones. There’s a hatching time involved and after that, there’s a chance of getting one random pet. Depending on its ability, you can decide to place it in your garden or sell it back to the pet shop.
Note that you need to consistently feed the pets to fill their hunger bar because that’s how they will age. You can feed the fruits from your garden and check the % of hunger solved with it. Based on that, you can increase the rarity of the fruit and check again.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What’s the best starter seed?
Carrot seeds: cheapest, fastest grow time, ideal for early reinvestment. - What are the best crops for mid and late game?
Mango, Dragon Fruit, Cactus and Coconut are favored for mid game while Mushroom, Candy Blossom (it was event-based), Moon Blossom, Cacao and Pepper are sought-after for late game. - How much is a Private Server?
It’s free! - Can you teleport to the Gear Shop?
Only if you have purchased this item called the Recall Wrench.
This was our Grow a Garden beginners’ guide. The tips, tricks, and strategies mentioned here will surely help you get a smooth start, increase your Sheckles income faster, and create a beautiful garden.