The Sims 4: Best Fertilizer

Highlights

• Gardening in The Sims 4 is a peaceful and rewarding activity that allows players to grow their own food and obtain ingredients for potions and spells.
• Bees are a valuable component to fertilizing plants in The Sims 4, as they tend to nearby crops and offer a small fertilizing buff to help them evolve faster.
• Fish can be used as an effective fertilizer in The Sims 4, with higher-value fish providing better fertilizing power. Growfruit and other plant-based fertilizers are also beneficial for gardening.

The Sims 4 offers dozens of activities, skills, and jobs to master. As such, the players can spend hundreds of hours directing their Sims’ life and still not run out of content to try out, things to do. One of the more peaceful activities is gardening.

Not only can the Sims use gardening to grow their own food, but it also comes in handy for spell casters who use the ingredients for potions, or even vampires. But to grow a lot of produce requires fertilizing the garden properly. Some of The Sims 4 fertilizers are better at this task than others. The good news is that most of them are relatively easy to come by and will help the player create a rich garden.

Updated on January 14, 2024, by Nahda Nabiilah: Thanks to the Horse Ranch Expansion Pack, Simmers won’t only enjoy taking care of the horses, but they will also benefit from the animal’s manure. When training horses, teaching them tricks, or feeding them grass in The Sims 4, you can expect three kinds of manure to drop from the horse and each one has a certain quality. On the other hand, taking care of bees will also result in bees tending to crops, which is a valuable component to fertilizing plants in The Sims 4.

7 Bee Box

Pollinate Nearby Plants

Bees in general have a lot of advantages in The Sims 4. Simmers can buy a Bee Box from Buy Mode and place it anywhere on the lot to start bonding with bees, as it’s a crucial step. Later on, you can start collecting honey from the box, which offers various benefits for Sims, either by cooking, selling, or eating it directly. After increasing friendship with bees, they will automatically start tending to nearby plants.

When bees fly around the garden and pollinate nearby crops, they offer a small fertilizing buff that can be stacked with other fertilizers like growfruit. This helps the crop evolve faster than normal crops found in players’ gardens. Additionally, after bonding with the bees for a while, a new option appears that allows you to collect a swarm of bees and manually send them to Pollinate Nearby Plants.

6 Fish

Keep Them Fresh

Since gardening is an activity that connects the Sims to nature, they can use their love for all things outdoors in another activity as well. Fishing is a separate skill that will help the Sims relax as well as catch fish for cooking… and fertilizing as well. The game contains many different types of fish, but the general rule is that the higher value the fish has (usually because it’s fresh), the better it will be to use it as a fertilizer. So, after the Sim catches the fish or buys it, they should keep it in the fridge until they’re ready to use it to fertilize their garden.

Most of the time, the fish should have a value of 50 Simoleons or more in order to function as an effective fertilizer. Lower-priced fish are more likely to have a medium fertilizer power instead of a high one. So, while the likes of perch or goldfish won’t help the Sims’ gardens a lot, tuna, salmon, sturgeon, or wolf eel are a different story.

5 Growfruit

Hard To Get Unless You Cheat

Growfruit is by far one of the best fertilizers in The Sims 4 that no player should miss out on using if they’re interested in gardening. But just like some of the best The Sims 4 objects, the growfruit can be harder to come by. It originally appeared in the game as a part of the Spring Challenge and is still available.

Fortunately, those players who have a hard time getting to the growfruit can use the power of cheats to access it. The proper cheat code for this is bb.showhiddenobjects which will also give the players access to many other useful objects that will enrich their gameplay even more. Another alternative how to get the growfruit is by purchasing the rare seed packets and hoping that they will contain the right plant.

4 Other Plant-Based Fertilizers Also Don’t Disappoint

Use Plants For Plants

Of course, no matter how good a fertilizer the growfruit is, it’s not the only Sims 4 plant that fulfills this purpose. As a result, the Sims can grow plants in their garden and either their higher-quality plants to earn extra money or use them as fertilizers for new plants instead. If the player decides to choose the second route, they should focus on growing plants such as roses, the snapdragon fruit, chrysanthemums, the bird of paradise plants, mushrooms, trash fruit, and quill fruit.

Some of these are available for purchase in the seed packets, while others are accessible via other means. For example, the bird of paradise plant is a part of the flowers of the Romance festival. Of all these plants, roses are probably the easiest fertilizers to come by, which makes them a good place to start before the players move on to getting more complex and rarer fertilizers.

3 The Hermit’s Secret Fertilizer

Find The Hermit

The worlds of The Sims 4 contain many secrets, one of which is the hermit’s secret fertilizer. This form of fertilizer is available only to those who have the Outdoor Retreat game pack, making it one of the easier-to-miss fertilizers in the game. There is an outdoor retreat location in the Granite Falls where the hermit resides.

After the Sims find and become friends with him, they can ask him to share his secret fertilizer recipe with them. Their hard work doesn’t end there. Once they get the recipe from the hermit, they also have to collect the right ingredients for the fertilizer. Its strength is worth it, though, and creating the fertilizer from the ground makes for satisfying gameplay for more ambitious players.

2 Pets Poop

Not The Golden One

Not only can pets in The Sims 4 produce golden poop, especially dogs, but it’s also possible to use the poop as a powerful fertilizer. And unlike other fertilizers that take a long time to produce or cost money to buy, this type of fertilizer is free.

Using it is simple. The Sim should place it in their inventory and then use it on the plant they wish to fertilize. However, it sometimes happens that fertilizing with poop doesn’t work. If that’s the case, it helps to first use a different type of fertilizer, a more traditional one, and only then try the pet poop again.

1 Horse Manure

Even More Poop

There are three qualities of horse manure in The Sims 4; poor, normal, and outstanding. All three qualities can be used as fertilizers for plants in the Simmers’ garden. Obviously, poor quality manure doesn’t help the plant that much, while the normal and outstanding qualities help the crop evolve faster. Horses with negative moods will produce poor manure, while happy horses produce either normal or outstanding, with the latter being rarer. Although pet poop is easier to come by, it doesn’t have many qualities like manure and might not work sometimes.

An easier way to get all types of manure is using cheats. Open the cheat box and write Testingcheats true and then type bb.showhiddenobjects. Enter Buy mode and write manure in the search bar to find all three qualities of horse manure.