How to grow a garden in Tales of the Shire

Gardening is an important pastime in Tales of the Shire. A proper Hobbit needs a proper garden full of fruits and veggies — including any ingredient that can’t be foraged in the wild. If you want the best garden in Bywater, simply sowing some seeds is not enough; you must also water your plants and mind their companions.

This Tales of the Shire gardening guide will show you how to unlock your inner Samwise Gamgee.

How to grow a garden in Tales of the Shire

Many fruits, vegetables, and seasonings can’t be foraged in the wilds, and neither can they be bought from stores. There’s only one option: to grow them in your own garden.

The first thing you need is seeds. You will receive random seeds by completing tales (quests), but you can also buy them from Farmer Cotton in the Village Square, north of your home. He will update his stock according to the season. It’s best to get as many different seeds as you can, so you have enough ingredients for a variety of dishes — this will help you satisfy your neighboring Hobbits’ cravings.

You can also buy additional garden beds from Farmer Cotton, but you don’t need to do so yet, as there already are some garden beds near your front door — apparently they came with the purchase of the Hobbit-hole.

While standing in your garden, open the Home Decoration menu (hold “H” on keyboard or the map button on a controller). Open the storage menu and click on the “garden” category. This will take you to your garden beds and seeds.

Click on the seeds you’d like to plant, then place them anywhere in the garden bed. It’s best to place them in a corner, so you can fit more than one plant in the same bed.

All you need to do is wait for the plant to grow. You can usually harvest the ingredients after three days. Although this concludes the gardening basics, beware that you may water the plants and pair them with companion ingredients to improve the growth speed and ingredient rarity.

To check if an ingredient is obtained through gardening or foraging, open the encyclopedia and hover over the plant. Does it display a preferred season only? Then it’s forageable. Does it show more info, including companion preferences? Then it’s grown in a garden. In the example below, only the strawberry is a garden plant.

Watering plants in Tales of the Shire

To boost your plants’ growth speed, you can water your plants. To equip the watering can, select it from the tool menu (press ‘T’ on keyboard or Up on the D-pad on console). Walk down to the nearby stream to fill it, then use it on every garden bed.

Note that gardening can’t fail, so you don’t have to water the plants. If you want them to grow as fast as possible though, water them once per day.

Companion planting and delicious harvest

You may have noticed that your fruit and vegetables are marked by one or more stars. This is the deliciousness rating. The more delicious the ingredient, the more it’s worth, and the tastier the food will be when prepared. 

To improve the chances of a delicious harvest, try to match plants that like each other; this is called companion planting. If you open the encyclopedia and hover over the fruit and vegetables, you will see the plants’ likes and dislikes.

If you place a seed in the same garden bed as the plants mentioned in its yellow “happy face” section, it improves the chances of a high deliciousness score. However, if you place it in the same bed as a plant from the blue “angry face” section, the chances of gaining a higher deliciousness rating are diminished.

In the example below, the beans like to be planted next to baby marrow, brown taters, and maize, but not shallots.

How to expand your garden

As you start a new game in Tales of the Shire, four sections of your garden are closed off. To unlock them, improve your gardening level. You can do so after you unlock the Gardening Club during the Bywater Village Campaign Tale (the main quest).

Gardening will always improve your gardening level, but to speed things up, be sure to complete additional gardening missions, which you can pick up from the mission board in the Village Square.