Gardening is one of many little additions that help make Final Fantasy XI the great game it is. Gardening can be done by anyone, as long as they have a little bit of patience, and the right seeds and crystals.

In order to do gardening, you must first have a flowerpot of any kind, and some seeds. There are various kinds of seeds in games which can be found on most Sapling type monsters, as well as the usual places such as the auction house, or bazaars. Some examples include Grain Seeds, Herb Seeds, Vegetable seeds, and others.

A slight aside, for those of you who don't have the money to buy a flowerpot, you can always craft one if you have enough skill. The procedure to craft a Brass Flowerpot is as follows:

Fire Crystal + 1 Zinc Ore + 3 Copper Ore = 1 Brass Ingot -- You need 3 Brass Ingots
Fire Crystal + 1 Brass Ingot = Brass Sheet -- You need 3 Brass Sheets
Fire Crystal + 3 Brass Sheets = Brass Flowerpot

Note that you will need a decent skill level in blacksmithing and goldsmithing in order to craft the flower pot.

Once you have your seed and flowerpot, go to your Mog House and place both items in the Mog Storage. If you havn't already done so, place the flowerpot in your home by using the Furniture option. Once done, in the main Mog House menu there is the option to Garden, select it and choose a flowerpot you wish to plant your seeds. Then, select the Plant Seed option.

The first step is over, now all you need to do is wait for the flower to grow to the point where you need to feed it to bloom. This could take anywhere from a day in real life, to a few days. The grain seeds, tend to have a 12-24 real time hours wait time before you can feed them any crystals. In order to tell if you're able to feed them or not, simply go to the gardening menu and select the flowerpot, and it will give you the option to feed your plant some crystals.

When the time comes to feed your plant, be sure to have some kind of crystal in your mog storage, and then select the option and the crystal. Depending on what kind of crystal you feed, you can get different results. For example, feeding it 1 water crystal has grown 14 fire crystals, or a single dark crystal has grown 8 light crystals. You won't always grow crystals, sometimes you can get random items like rocksalts, or Crystal Fungus, etc…

After you've fed your plant a crystal, this is where you simply wait for the flower to bloom. This tends to take longer than the previous wait. For grain seeds, this takes roughly 36-48 real life hours. Once the plant has grown you'll have the option to Harvest the plant, so you can get your items and start over.

Note that if for some reason your plant appears to be dead, you'll most likely want to tear out the plant and start over. Whether or not drying your plants can produce something useful has yet to be determined, so if you have any information feel free to submit that information.

There you have it, gardening in a nutshell. One thing to keep in mind is you can only have a maximum of 10 flowerpots in your home at a time, so you can't grow things all day unfortunately. If you have any more information regarding gardening, feel free to send us an email at ffnews@vaultnetwork.com

Happy gardening!