I find ladybug houses help enormously. It takes a bit of upkeep on the garden but once your sim has a gold badge and you have the kids weeding (builds after school fun quickly) you can have a number of plots of healthy vegies. That's been my experience with it anyway. Some of my sims simply drink their skills from the eggplants they have grown.
I have some pastel recolours from someplace. I wouldn't mind some brighter recolours.

I'll look at the texture map, and see if it's something I can wrestle with. I'm thinking a wood texture from Goat and applying actions over it. Maybe Alfie's actions...?

Plumbob keep has a wood texture, but I haven't seen any in Alfie's actions.

I've been wanting to recolor the ladybug houses, myself. I'm thinking plain woods but also some brighter paintjobs. I actually like the paintjob they have (It's cute, but not TOO cute), but some variety would be nice. I think there are some recolors already here on MTS, if I'm not mistaken. In any case, not sure I can recolor anything while I'm away from my home desktop. I don't have SimPE on the wee netbook here...although I'm feeling like making SOMETHING, so I might download it and/or Homecrafter and see how it does...

Anyway, whoa thread drift. Such vitriol! I organic garden (Well, my daughter does; I have a black thumb, not a green one) because we've got a well at home, no "municipal water," and everything that we might spray would end up in it. I don't want to be drinking that shit, thanks. I really don't care about "saving the world," and I know that organic gardening on a large scale is inefficient and would not feed everyone. (Yes, I am a Penn & Teller fan, too. I might not always agree with them, but I likes their style. ) But it works perfectly well on a small scale. Beyond that, gardening in the game is too easy. I'd get bored of it if I didn't throw some obstacles in the farmers' way. (Hence, water restriction when it doesn't rain and banning pesticide and only allowing Plantsims to talk to plants, etc.)

@ gummilutt: I'm the opposite. I only very rarely have plants in greenhouses. My farmers get the late fall/winter (if there is one) off. They need it! Sometimes I've done greenhouses for hobby gardeners, but that was a long time ago. Might be interesting to set up some side-by-side trials on the same lot (so that all conditions are the same) to test the "greenhouse effect" (HAH!) more systematically. Off to the Neighborhood of Testing Weird Shit! I think I have a Plantsim floating around in there who might be willing to help us.

Neither ladybug houses nor spraying, nor greenhouses, nor any other single factor, will guarantee a good crop because they are each only one factor. In order to get a good crop, your sims (or you, in real life) have to be out there working on it every single day. Don't put in a garden at all if you don't have somebody who can take care of it. Trading off the work slows down badge acquisition, and that's the single biggest factor; but even a gold gardener who doesn't take time to tend the trees and growing plants will get trees and plants that don't thrive.

Trees are hard because you can't tend them all the time, only in daylight. One big advantage the ladybug houses have over spraying is, that the ladybugs are always there working, but you don't always have the option to spray the trees even when you can see that the problem is bugs.

What do you mean you can't tend trees at night? I've made a sim wake up in the middle of the night already in order to tend a tree as soon as it got untended.

Yeah, I can do anything with trees at night that I can do in the day. I've got vampire farmers who do all their stuff at night, so...yeah. The only time I can't tend trees is when they go dormant in the winter...but then they don't need tending. So, not sure what you're talking about there, Peni. (Do you remember Diff'rent Strokes? "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" )

In any case I find trees hard because there's less you can do with them, period. You can trim them and you can talk to them and if they get bugs you can spray them. But since I disallow talking to plants except for Plantsims and I've mostly disallowed pesticide except for large-scale farmers which in my game are "corporate farmers" whose priority is not the local environment, it makes them that much harder. Their quality seems to vary greatly by the season, which I guess makes sense.

I do wish there were more varieties of fruit trees. As it is, you've got two tropicals that in the real world, wouldn't tolerate a long, cold, snowy winter at all, and would die, not go dormant. And you've got one temperate species. IMO, more temperate species are needed, since the four-season thing that Seasons adds IS a temperate climate. I'm guessing the apple tree could be cloned and recolored with different fruits, but if I attempted that I'd want juicer recipes for that fruit, and that kind of stuff is beyond my abilities.

That's...interesting. Especially since I can suddenly remember several occasions of tree-trimming at night - I have pictures of it. Okay, I know what I meant and for some reason my memory went haywire and I wrote down the wrong thing - I often have sickly trees that I'm not allowed to interact with. I can see the tree is in bad shape, but I can't tend it and can't spray it. This does not, however, only happen at night. I just have to keep coming back to the tree periodically until it lets me tend it. Which is a pain in the neck, let me tell you.

Trees are a pain in the ass in general. Yeah, sometimes I'll see the quality going down...and down...and there's nothing I can do about it because their aren't any available interactions except "Talk To" if the "clicking Sim" has a gold badge...but since I don't let most Sims do that...GRAH! Eventually the thing will sprout something trimmable, and then there's something I can do, but the tree often goes down several levels before that happens and then sometimes they never recover to the level they were before that sequence. I think it's seasonal, like I said. Which is why it's frustrating that 2/3 of the trees they gave us in the game are tropicals who don't like early spring, fall, and then they go dormant in the winter. Thanks, EA. *eye roll*

I'm trying to remember if I've ever had a situation of visible bugs but no spray option. I tend to think that if there are visible bugs, then you get the spray option, but now I'm not 100% sure. Not that I'd be able to spray them anyway, for the most part.

Let me know how it works out iCad! I am really curious. I would test it myself, but no Sims at the moment (sob).

Trees are definitely pains to make happy if you aren't allowed to talk to them. Far too many things make them go down, and far too few make them go up. I might give not talking to them a try just to see if I can detect the seasonal difference you mention =)

Another cool thing they could have had would be bush or vine fruit (grapes, raspberries, etc) Not sure what the juice (or combinations with other fruits/veggies) would do, but maybe with grape juice you could store it and in a sim day or so (in reality it takes months but in sim time...) would have wine - maybe that would improve mood or be sold at a good price.

I want the nectar making object from Sims1, and was very disappointed not to get one with Seasons.

For those of you who never played Sims1, you could plant elderberries and grapes, keep a beehive to get honey, and buy sugar at certain community lots. When you had these things in your inventory, you could put them into the nectar press - basically a wooden tub with a still attached - in certain combinations and get the option to make Grape Nectar, or Elderberry Nectar, or Honey Nectar. Whichever one you chose, the sim would swoosh into a bathing suit, hop into the the wooden tub and do a stomping dance to crush the fruit and mix the ingredients, then hop out (wiping her feet on the grass!) and work the still, winding up with bottles of nectar in inventory, which could be used in magic spells, given as gifts, or sold. I had farming sims make good money off that object - it was great. The only problem was that you couldn't actually drink the nectar.

A juicer just doesn't have the same panache, you know?

I didn't play TS1, but I think I want that, too! :D

That's probably my only complaint about the gardening, that there's not enough variety, both with the trees AND the plot-plants. I've interspersed Echo's pre-Seasons harvestable plants, too, but they don't work quite the same. I'm actually surprised that no one's created more Seasons plants...but maybe that's really difficult/impossible to do. But I want cabbages and carrots and lettuce and spinach and broccoli/cauliflower and zucchini and corn and radishes and beets and turnips and squash and watermelons and pumpkins and plum trees and cherry trees and pear trees and cranberry trees and...

Yeah, I'm not hard to please.

ETA @ gummilutt, since I just noticed your post: I'm not sure the seasonal difference actually exists. It's something I think I've noticed but I'm not sure. I also think that trees improve quality (or "ease of quality," if you will) with each fruiting cycle, but I'm not sure about that either. I DO know that certain plot-plants prefer to be planted at certain times of the year (read that at Snooty Sims, I think), but I don't know if these "tree trends" actually exist or if it's just me seeing patterns in chaos. I shall test this more systematically, along with the "greenhouse effect." I'll need to run the test for a while to get full results, though. I'll let you know what I discover.

What would y'all say was about the radius of effect around a ladybug house, anyway? 3 squares? 5 squares? More than that?

ETA: I allow talking to trees: by plantsims, at the hippie commune, and by small children.

I use the ladybug houses in the middles of three-tree triangles , and they work really well in that configuration. I don't know what the actual effective radius is (would be nice to know!), but I try to keep anything I want protected within 3-4 tiles of the ladybug house.

Regarding recolors, I have one that has a weathered wood look that I like a lot. In some gardens, the default ladybug house is a little too pretty. I'm not a fan of grunge, irl, but in my game, at least a little "old and [slightly] grungy" is preferred.

It would be great if someone would make more garden trees and plants. Not sure on the trees but I know more growable plants are possible as I found one... a marijuana plant in the graveyard. I tried it out a few days back and it grows, needs weeding and watering and harvesting. My sim has what looks like 5 joints in his inventory now. The fact I tried it at the mayors house won't be talked about. >cough< I figure my hippy commune can grow the stuff and if the police should find it... I haven't figured all that out but it seems like a fun addition.

I put them down about one per 3x3 garden plot, with the house in the middle square. That way it seems to affect all the plants around it. I'm not sure what the maximum radius might be, but I do know that 1 per 3x3 plot works well. Putting more in that area doesn't seem to make anything work better or faster. For trees, Darby's plan seems about right to me.

@ Jo: o_O BRB, I'm off to the Graveyard to find SimWeed. Why didn't you tell me about this sooner, damn you?! Heeeeeeere weedy, weedy, weedy....

But yeah, if they can make weed, I'll bet it's possible to make other growables, legal or otherwise. Hmmmmmm.....

Hehe, I knew you would like that. It's called rather carefully 'Maryjane' so it's easy to miss. I should have put the site name on the folder but didn't. It comes with it's own dirt plot. I have no idea if the sims can do anything with what they have harvested yet. Thought I might try setting it for sale although it says it's worth $0 which is a shame. How do they expect illegal weed growers to make a living?

I'd love to have pumpkins, grapes and other plants which require the same care that tomatoes and things in game do.

Edit: Not the graveyard but Googling found it on the booty. Are we allowed to mention that here? -_-

So, I actually did work on recolors of the Ladybug loft...



Thoughts? I was going for 'Farmer Bob built this with his grandson Timmy' feel.

Very nice Fivey.

Hell if I know, girl! But I found it. I think it'll be fabulous at the hostel you built, utilizing Honeywell's container gardening up on the roof, if I can make it work. Heeheeheeehee...*rubs hands together evilly* And hippie communes, too, of course! Thanks for letting me know it exists.

But yes, I want all sorts of growable/harvestable things because I'm greedy that way. It'd be great if you could grow pumpkins and then carve them, but I know that's probably asking too much. The harvestables based on Echo's plants are great, but it'd be better if the harvesting cycle was closer to the one Eaxis eventually used in Seasons. I know Echo's came first, though. If I get SimPE running on this machine I might have a look at that "maryjane" and see if it can be modified or maybe backwards-engineer how they modified the Seasons plants. Might be a bit beyond me, though.

ETA: Those are quite nice, Fivey! I'd download them.

It's been mentioned here you can direct people to the booty. Unfortunately it hasn't been updated in a while - not this year yet.

It has to be grown in it's own 1 by 1 garden plot, but as you just plop it down not draw it out like the maxis plots, maybe it could be put on an OMPS and moved into a large tub.
The roof would be perfect, have fun!

Heh, I can now confirm that "it" works with Honeywell's planters . It looks a little odd because the plot is square (Honeywell made round plots to work with the planters, but since "it" is a custom plot...), but I can live with it. Much fun will be had at the hostel, yes.

Anyway, silliness aside, this gives me hope that other custom Seasons growables are indeed possible. I'm going to have a look at the code and see if I can't figure it out... But, uh, have to download SimPE first and get it running. If I can figure it out and make it happen, this is definitely something I want. The piece that would likely be missing would be juicer recipes, but you can't have everything. (Well, you probably CAN, but I don't have the smarts to make it all happen.

iCad if you can make other season plantables I'll love you forever. I'm not bothered by juicer recipes, I'd just like to stock the fridge and sell them.

Pictures of 'it'