Gardening - Farming, Improvements, and Gardening

[Dorkyartist]

I know the gardening job is one of the least profitable and complicated jobs in the city, when it has real potential to be a good legal job for non-whitelisted legal citizens, as well as offers an opportunity to get more roleplay involved in the process of gathering ingredients for restaurants.
Before I get ahead of myself, let’s start by discussing some of the negatives/possible issues with the current gardening job as it is. 
1. It makes little to no profit.

        With the gardening job, you are required to buy a shovel and watering can, and you need to take the time to gather soil, which isn’t so bad. However, with each plant you “give love” to, you are required to have one gardening soil and one water bottle to care for the plant. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, as the profit should make up for the money spent on water bottles. However, you only earn about $90-$120 per plant, but each water bottle costs $40, so the profit is only about $50-$80. This is a VERY low profit for the amount of time it takes to gather all the needed supplies and the time it takes to care for the plant.

2. There is a lack of gardenable plants.

        On top of the low amount of profit, only a select few of the plants in the city are able to be gardened, and the ones that are able to be gardened are far and few between, spread far across the city, so you spend more time driving around trying to find plants to garden then actually making money. Plus, there is a limited number of plants you can garden, and on top of that, once one person has gardened a plant, nobody else can care for that plant for the rest of the day.

        Overall, these problems basically make the gardening job impractical. Some solutions would include raising the payment amount per plant, making more plants gardenable, or taking out the need to use a water bottle.

 

However, on top of this, I see some potential for even more improvement. I live on a farm irl, and many of my friends as well as myself greatly enjoy gardening. It always feels rewarding to eat something you’ve grown yourself through hard work! After all, quality ingredients are produced through quality farming and gardening! 
There are a couple ways you could implement my idea into the city.

        All ingredients, food, and plants come from somewhere, right? Plants need to be grown, and animals needs to be raised and butchered for meat (like they are on la fuente blanca/the ranch). I feel it would add more interactions and roleplay to the city if certain foods and ingredients needed to cook dishes in restaurants had to be grown by other civilians. Gardening would not only add a cool hobby, but also add another lifestyle to earn money by without being illegal. I had several ideas on ways to implement this.

1. Gardening - You simply add the ability to grow foods to the gardening job. Seeds for growing fruits and veggies could be purchased at the fruit stands found throughout the city, and they could also sell the foods there as well. Plants could be grown similar to jute, or could be grown over a certain amount of time.

2. Farming - another cool way to have gardening food implemented into the city would be having a new job in the city— farming! I figured farming could be done in different ways. One way to farm specific foods such as corn, soybeans, and other mass-grown crops in fields would be to have people purchase farmland, then use a specific model of tractor from the city to plow fields, plant seeds, and harvest the crop! For plants grown in orchards and greenhouses/gardens, have open orchards where people can clock in to pick fruits, and even have orchards owned by farmers who would hire people to care for and harvest their fruits/veggies!

 

3. Hobby - With this method to implement growing foods, people could grow plants on their home property by buying seeds from a fruit stand and growing them on their home property on soil, grass, or terrain.

 

Of course, not all of the ingredients that restaurants use would need to be grown, as that could be a little too difficult and complicated, but just making a few ingredients require gardening to obtain could link together working citizens around the city and restaurants to have more interaction when it comes to businesses and supplies, and would be a more realistic and interesting way to source food!

 

I hope to hear other opinions on the subject, and feedback is appreciated!

[Zynthia]

You could have it so that weeds, bushes, leaves, or misc clutter grow out of control around owned businesses and houses, making them look ugly. These would need to be removed by gardeners on a regular basis. The good-looking plant-life can also decay over time unless maintained.

Then you can have groups of people forming gardening businesses, going around in trucks and hitting multiple locations.
Perhaps they could get paid by the city, or the businesses/home owners themselves.

There would be an in-character demand for gardeners, full of RP opportunities.

Edited November 3, 2021 by Zynthia

[Erwin]

Absolutely, I can see great ideas for this. Especially with Zynthia’s suggest to include houses. How many people actually go to their house and water their garden or the plants around? Make it so it has to be tended for in some way otherwise your house starts to turn brown