Gardening Skill

The following is a summary of the steps to follow to create your own plants. For the full, detailed guide to gardening, please read the UO file extracted from the Codex of Wisdom .

I was gonna write out a complete chart of the possible hybrids, but I couldn't possibly do a better job than accomplished on the Tower of Roses. They have, in my humble opinion, the best Gardening Charts available. That's the one I use all the time.

First, you will need to obtain seeds either by killing Boglings and Bog Things, or buying them from other players. For bonsai, you can only obtain the seeds by killing creatures in the Tokuno Islands. For rare colored seeds (such as Fire, Magenta, Aqua...) you can only get those seeds through the Naturalist quest. The bonsai and rare colored plants do not produce seeds nor resources.

You will now need to fill the plant bowl with dirt. You can obtain the dirt either by double clicking your plant bowl and targetting any brown dirt area such as roads, dirt areas around moongates or dirt patches alonside town buildings. Or you can use fertile dirt found as loot on earth elementals. The earth eles fertile dirt is highly recommended as it significantly increases the growth speed of your plants. The downside is, you will need 40 earth elemental fertile dirts to fill one bowl. Since only 1 fertile dirt spawns per earth ele, it might take a while.

Add water to your hard dirt bowl (twice) and plant your seed. You must log on at least once a day to check the status of your seed. If your plant becomes sick, you will need to use potions to heal it.

If you over-water your plant, it will likely contract a fungal disease. To get rid of the fungi, use a greater cure potion. Do not over cure it or it will start to wither.
- If your plant has become sick from over-curing, apply greater heal potions to restore it back to health.. You can view your plant's current Disease meter from the Plant Health menu.
If your plant is infested by insects, use poison potions to kill them off. Once again, if you pour too much poison, you will do more harm than good. You can view the Infestation meter in the Plant Health menu. Flowery or bright plants are more susceptible of attracting insects. Over-watering them too might have the same effects
- If you harm your plant by applying too much Poison, just apply greater heals to solve the problem. You can view your plant's current Poison meter in the Plant Health menu.
If your plant has been over-watered, there isn't much you can do. Just don't add anymore water until the levels come back to normal and keep an eye on harmful disease the overwatering might bring about. You can view your plant's current Water meter in the Plant Health menu.

Note that only greater potions will work on your plants. regular strength ones will not be accepted.

Your plants can grow under 3 environments: your backpack, your bankbox, or locked down in your house. If you carry the plants inside your backpack or in your bankbox, you will need to log in with the character carrying it or who's bank holds it for the plant to go through her daily growth process. If the plant is locked down in your house, it will go through the growth process, whether you log on or not. It is therefore more likely to wither and die if neglected. Considering that ONLY the plant owner who locked down the plant can perform maintenance on them you will have to carefully choose with location is better suited for your plants in accordance with your play time. The occasional player should keep their plants in their bank or backpack.

The plants grow on a cycle, from seed to sapling to full grown plant. Once they have reached full growth, numerous options are available.

Resource Producing Plant (rare): such a plant will produce 1 resource each day for a maximum of 8 resources. To collect the resources, use the Gather Resources button on the Resource menu.

Non-Resource Producing Plant (common): such a plant will produce 1 seed each day for a maximum of 8 seeds. You can collect these seeds using the Gather Seeds button on the Resources menu.

Decorative Mode: at any time, you can set the fully grown plant to decorative mode. This will end its daily seed/resource production and will also remove all upkeep requirements. Note that once set to decorative mode, you cannot revert to seed/resource production.
Cross-Pollination: allows you to breed a new strain of plants using 2 existing plants. You will need to use the pollen which can be viewed in the Pollination State screen of the Plant Resources menu. If you do nothing, the plant will produce a seed for a plant identical to itself. If you wish to create a new strain, you will need to collect the pollen from another plant (use the cross-pollination button) and add it to the target plant. The target plant will start producing seeds hybrid of the two parent plants. Once a plant has been pollinated with another plants pollen, you will not be able to do a cross-pollination with a third plant (ie, you can only use a different plant's pollen on one plant ONCE).