Preserving Fertilizer using Multi Season Crops

[Meviin]

I'm in Summer of my first year, and I have 250 tiles fertilized. I'm not looking forward to finding and chopping down another 80 trees to get the sap to fertilize them again in Fall.

The wiki indicates that multi-season crops stay fertilized between seasons even though fertilizer usually disappears at the end of a season. Does that mean that I could pickaxe all of my blueberries and replace them with wheat at the end of Summer and the land would stay fertilized in the Fall?

Assuming that works, would planting (and watering) the wheat on Summer 28 work, or would I need to plant it on Summer 27 so that it has already sprouted by the end of the season?

Thanks!

[The Y'All Of Us]

It'll work- the fertilizer does eventually fade regardless, but you can extend it into the season just by planting the new crop. It doesn't have to have sprouted, so long as the seeds are in the ground.

[Mrrshan68]

Seems somewhat pointless?
i mean if its normal fertilizer not the super fancy stuff that needs coral and whatnot the store sells it for 100g a pop. wheat is 10g so to save 90g per plot or 22,500 you are willing to pickaxe 250 blueberries, plant 250 wheat, pickaxe 250 wheat?

surely if your operation is 250 crops + god knows how many kegs/jars its just not worth it?

[I Kinda Fail]

Why not just go chop down Cindersap Forest? That alone should give you half the sap needed, not to mention wood for building stuff... If you have 250 crops, you should definitely have an upgraded axe. And presumably you have trees growing on your farm, too...

[The Y'All Of Us]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Mrrshan68:

Seems somewhat pointless?
i mean if its normal fertilizer not the super fancy stuff that needs coral and whatnot the store sells it for 100g a pop. wheat is 10g so to save 90g per plot or 22,500 you are willing to pickaxe 250 blueberries, plant 250 wheat, pickaxe 250 wheat?

surely if your operation is 250 crops + god knows how many kegs/jars its just not worth it?

That sounds about right, actually- keeping that 20k is worth the effort of swinging your pick up and down the field, especially if you're planning on investing that money into more seeds. They can always replenish their energy at the Sauna.

[YetiChow]

If you pickaxe the plants, it will remove the fertiliser along with them.

If you have 250 blueberry plants, then my guess is that you'll want to move into cranberries for fall; so in that case it's probably not even worth bothering with fertiliser. Quality-improving fertilisers only affect one fruit per harvest, and speed-grow is only relevant at the start of the season anyway.

The time this trick becomes useful is if you're planting a large field of high-value, single-harvest crops (cauliflower, melon, starfruit, pumpkin, etc.), and time it so that you harvest them a couple of days before the season change. Even then, there are only three multi-season crops, and two of them are repeat-harvest; so the utility of this trick is extremely limited.

The only case I'd bother with it would be growing melons/starfruit in Summer, and then putting wheat down on the 27th to carry the fertiliser over into Fall for the pumpkin patch.

[Tumalu]

It's not worth swinging your pick anyway- the pick only covers ONE SQUARE unlike a hoe doing up to 15 at once; that would take an obscene amount of time.

Anyway, Yetichow's advice is very solid.

Also, only tangentially related but, if you're using at least normal fertilizer, the fact that the whole pumpkin harvest can be quality boosted actually makes them MORE profitable than cranberries now that the berry price has been nerfed.

The gold per day is nearly identical for normal fertilizer though, admittedly; pumpkins only edge them out by a very small amount. (They do cost MUUUCH less in seeds at season start, though) However, once kegs come into the picture, pumpkins work better because they harvest in single amounts instead of cranberries being 2 per harvest, despite the fact that pickling is less value than wine; it also pickles decently faster than wine so you're more likely to able to pickle a significant chunk of your non-quality pumpkins, pushing them well past cranberries. (Plus you've got all of winter with no crops to keep pickling pumpkins...) If you've got the artisan perk (pretty likely) a half-decent amount of kegs will make pumpkins very well superior.

It's the exact same case with blueberries and red cabbages, too- except for the fact you can only buy red cabbages in year 2, and the other fact that if you've got the oasis unlocked and the money for the massive initial cost, starfruits beat out both of them.

(Spring is pretty simple at least, strawberries are literally like 3x the profit of any other spring crop... but you have to stock up on their seeds ahead of time because festival. They're also the best reharvestable greenhouse crop before ancient fruit- probably #3 best crop, starfruit being #2 but not a reharvestable thing.)

[Meviin]

Thanks for all of the advice!

To clarify, I don't have 250 plots because I'm far along -- I'm just a min maxer trying to get my farm going as quickly as possible. I still don't have many sprinklers, and my only upgrades are a copper axe, a steel watering can, and the medium backpack. I don't have any jars yet, but I'll be trying to get a collection of them by the end of summer.

Ursprungligen skrivet av Mrrshan68:

i mean if its normal fertilizer not the super fancy stuff that needs coral and whatnot the store sells it for 100g a pop. wheat is 10g so to save 90g per plot or 22,500 you are willing to pickaxe 250 blueberries, plant 250 wheat, pickaxe 250 wheat?

Saving 20k would be great for me. I spent everything to get my farm planted in summer, and I still need to work up some cash to get fruit trees and animal stuff so that I can finish the community center year 1, not to mention equipment upgrades and stuff for food.

To be clear, though, at this point, I don't have the funds to just buy fertilizer, so I've been crafting it.

Ursprungligen skrivet av I Kinda Fail:

Why not just go chop down Cindersap Forest?

It's still growing back from last time I did that ;)

Ursprungligen skrivet av YetiChow:

If you pickaxe the plants, it will remove the fertiliser along with them.

Ah, if I can't pickaxe the plants, then the utility of this trick is much more limited. Thanks for letting me know!

Only 80 of my crops are blueberries -- I also have 45 melons and 10-20 of each of the other summer crops (I wanted a diversity of things for gifting, crafting, and the polyculture achievement). So, I might still do as you suggest and carry over the fertilizer from melons to pumpkins.

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tumalu:

It's not worth swinging your pick anyway- the pick only covers ONE SQUARE unlike a hoe doing up to 15 at once; that would take an obscene amount of time.

Yep, doing things that take an obscene amount of time is pretty much my playthrough so far ;)

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tumalu:

Also, only tangentially related but, if you're using at least normal fertilizer, the fact that the whole pumpkin harvest can be quality boosted actually makes them MORE profitable than cranberries now that the berry price has been nerfed.

I'll need to sell at least part of my Summer harvest to pay for Fall seeds and such, but I was planning on preserving the rest. I don't suspect I'll be able to get enough kegs to process my stuff in a reasonable amount of time, even given winter, so I'll plan on just preserving everything since it's faster. That's a good point about not being able to preserve all of my berries -- I didn't do the math on how limited my preservers will be. Looks like I'll need to emphasize pumpkins more than berries in the Fall!

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tumalu:

(Spring is pretty simple at least, strawberries are literally like 3x the profit of any other spring crop... but you have to stock up on their seeds ahead of time because festival. They're also the best reharvestable greenhouse crop before ancient fruit- probably #3 best crop, starfruit being #2 but not a reharvestable thing.)

Good to know! I managed to save for 40 strawberry seeds at the fair, so that should give me a good start on the greenhouse.

[rk]

I know this is an old thread but I decided to correct something for the sake of folks like myself arriving here via Google. @YetiChow said:

"If you pickaxe the plants, it will remove the fertiliser along with them."

However I just tested this under 1.2.33 and it's incorrect. Using the pickaxe will remove the planted crop, but leave any fertilizer in the underlying soil intact.