The Sims 4: Oversized Crops (Cottage Living)

One of the new features from The Sims 4: Cottage Living is the new oversized crop varieties that your sims are able to grow, eat, sell or enter in the Finchwick Fair to earn awesome prizes. These operate a bit different than regular gardening crops, so it’s important to know the differences before going off and planting them everywhere on your lot.

Types of Oversized Crops

There are a total of 5 oversized crops that came with The Sims 4: Cottage Living and they are the following:

• Aubergine
• Lettuce
• Mushroom
• Pumpkin
• Watermelon

All five of these plants are going to function the exact same way and are cared for the same way, but will have a different outcome of course! These plants can be purchased by clicking on the garden plots for oversized crops, or at Agnes and Agatha’s garden stall in the town square.

Planting Your Oversized Crops

Once you have your hands on some oversized crops, you’ll want to go back and click on the oversized crop plots and choose to plant them. A popup will appear letting you choose from whichever ones you’ve purchased so you can plant them.

When you plant them initially they are going to show up as having 9 spots, this will slowly change with time depending on the quality of your crop and its crop yield.

Fertilizing Your Oversized Crops

If you’re really trying to grow oversized crops and not just a couple small pumpkins or watermelons, you are going to need to use fertilizer for the best results. There are a few types of fertilizer for your sim to get their hands on including:

• Hassle Free Fertilizer
• Vitality Fertilizer
• Super Vitality Fertilizer
• Grow Fast Fertilizer

There are a few ways that you can get fertilizers for your oversized crops, the first and easiest way is to purchase them by just clicking on the special oversized crop garden plots. There is an option that will say purchase oversized crop fertilizers and this will open a menu letting you choose specific types of fertilizer that your sim has unlocked based on their skills.

There are a couple of others ways you may get fertilizers including from cleaning out your animal shed, purchasing them from Agnes or Agatha at the garden stall and finally as a prize for the Finchwick Fair events.

How to Care for Your Oversized Crops

Just like with regular gardening in The Sims 4, you’ll need to consistently care for your oversized crops. Of course, you’ll need to ensure that you are watering these crops daily unless they stay watered overnight. You’ll always want to make sure they are free of weeds by weeding them when necessary and making sure there are no bugs on these crops and if you see them, be sure to spray for bugs.

If you want to take the easy way out, you have the option of using the hassle free fertilizer to get your crops to be free of bugs and weeded without as much effort which is awesome for sims with regular jobs or kids and animals to care for.

You are also going to want to encourage crop growth whenever you can but this does have a cooldown for you to wait through between attempts. You can find this interaction when clicking on the garden plots.

How to Get Bigger Crops

There are 3 different sizes of oversized crops for your sim to experience, with the best being the large crops which will take up the entire plot for a single one. The next is the medium size where you’ll have two crops per garden plot. And finally, the small ones will let your sim harvest four per plot.

There are a number of things you’re able to do to try and encourage larger crops. The first is to use different fertilizers, preferably the super vitality fertilizer if you can get your hands on it as it will encourage growth the most. You’ll want to make sure you are being consistent with weeding and watering and spraying for bugs to ensure your plants are healthy.

You will want to use the encourage crop growth interaction to try and convince them to be larger and socialize with them when possible. You can also use rabbits and birds to your advantage which we will discuss in a bit.

Socializing With Your Oversized Crops

After a few days of growth, a healthy plant will allow you to socialize with it. However, I am not currently sure if these socializations will positive affect the growth of your crop but it is a fun interaction to chat with plants, plus it will get your sim’s social need higher. The interactions include things like:

• Urge to Romaine Calm
• Vent About Problems
• Give Encourage-Mint
• Share News About Flowery Matters
• Take Selfie with Crop

Uprooting Plants

There is also a new interaction on these crops call uproot plant this is not something you want to do! It will not assist in your growing your plants more quickly, it will, in fact, do the opposite and remove the plant entirely.

Getting Animals to Help

One awesome thing about wild animals in this pack is that if you grow high enough relationships with them you can actually use them to your advantage and rabbits are incredible for growing crops. To be able to do this with rabbits, you’ll first want to befriend a wild rabbit and go ahead and get their rabbit tree stump on your lot.

You’ll eventually be able to ask for gardening help and this will toggle on the ability for this rabbit to eat the weeds that appear on your oversized crops, and they will also add a little something extra to enrich the soil which is awesome in helping you have larger crops!

Befriending those flocks of birds that have stumps around the world can be beneficial too. Once you’ve befriended one and added their tree to your lot you’ll be able to ask them for gardening help as well. This gardening help is going to target all of the bugs on your oversized crops and remove them and also these birds will sing to your crops for growth help.

Attending the Finchwick Fair

Once you have your hands on some large crops, you’ll want to show them off at the Finchwick Fair. You’ll want to wait for the week where there is an oversized crop competition and harvest one of your big crops to bring with you. You can then enter it in the competition, the bigger, the better!

Final Thoughts

There you have it folks, everything you need to know about oversized crops and growing them in The Sims 4: Cottage Living. These crops are awesome because you can enter them into the fair, earn money from selling them, plus they look hilarious especially when your sims are taking selfies with them. Happy playing!