Viva Pinata - On Plants

Plants serve a few different purposes. Aside from providing you with a little bit of aesthetic pleasure, they can be used for food, romancing requirements and, my personal favorite, money. If you grow a plant from a seed and use fertilizer correctly then you can sell the plant for roughly ten times the cost of the seed. If you grow ten plants at a time, you can start to rake in as much as 5000 coins in one easy go.

There are two types of plants. There are flowering plants, like lilacs and water lilies, which can be fertilized at any time, and trees, which have to be fertilized at specific times. Almost all plants can be fertilized three times. The only noticible plant that doesn't is the Gem Tree which only needs to be fertilized once. What this really means is that if you want to make money, then flowers are really the way to go. They aren't quite as expensive or profitable as trees but they are far easier to fertilize and grow to full potential. As a general rule of thumb, trees should be fertilized just after being planted as well as each time leaves shake down from their branches. This doesn't always hold true though. Sometimes you don't need to fertilize it just after planting or during a particular growth stage and you'll have to fertilize twice during another. In fact, there are every some trees that are particularly picky that you have to fertilize when buds appear but before the buds burst. Sometimes I just take fertilizer to it constantly until the tree has grown fully. It can run you 300 coins but it'll give you the bonus growth awards.

Also, as a side note, both the Croacodile and Taffly can help with fertilizing. If a taffly eats the fruit product of a plant, it will produce the correct fertilizer for that plant. Croacodiles on the other hand can use "Crocodile tears" which will fertilize the plant once with what is equivalent to the Special Mix fertilizer.

Special Mix Fertilizer always acts as the correct type of fertilizer and can be bought from Ivor Bargains when his shop opens.

And while I've spent a considerable amount of time talking about fertilizer, don't forgot that you still need to water your plants. If the leaf in the water meter turns blue then you've watered too much and if it turns brown it needs watering. Try and keep it between those two stages in the green area. You can kill the plant if you water it too much or not at all. Be careful, too, because not all plants water at the same pace. I accidentally killed a pumpkin once because I put the long pour on once and I turned my head to talk to someone. By the time that I looked back it was already dead... which is saying something because it was almost dead from neglect before I watered it.