FarmVille - Trees+ Blooms.

Recommendation: Specialize your farms.

	(Animals and) trees are not really something for the beginning farmer to concentrate on. The animals and trees you get for free do not provide any XP.  They are kinda cute though ... Purchasing an animal or tree from the market gives you a ONE-TIME XP as listed. Harvesting an animal or tree does not give XP, so that will not help you to level up.
	Use your home farm for crop production. You have many more plots there. Crop farming is a better use of of space for the beginning farmer as it will advance you much faster.
	Do not put up animal or trees in home farm. Keep your animals and trees in your gift box until you have access to a second farm.
	Use Lighthouse Cove farm for your animals and trees. Your farming plots are very limited there, so crop farming will be less important there.

COMMENT re. trees:

For the beginning farmer, quantity would be more important than quality.
Collect all trees you can get from the feeds or grow from seedlings and place them on your 2nd farm for coin generation.
These coins will help you expand your farms and your crafting buildings more quickly.
Use farmhands and arborists for 1-click harvesting of all free-standing animals and trees.

When you start getting crowded for space, start thinking quality instead of quantity.
Discard low-yield items and keep the higher-yield items to get higher yields for the same space.

	Trees are harvested for coins and mastery points. Harvesting trees does not give XP, so trees will not help you level up. Tree farming is therefore not important for the beginning farmer. Do not waste your crop spaces to place trees on them. Use only empty space. for tree mastery requirements, see list on THIS PAGE.
	Harvestable trees are divided in two categories: Level 1 trees: available to any farmer with the appropriate level via market or gift and a few other sources ... cannot be obtained by growing a Mystery Seedling. Some level 1 trees may be impossible to get if you don't want to spend FV-cash. usually gave very low harvest yields.   Level 2 trees: Many can be obtained for free by growing a Mystery Seedlings or directly from the feeds when someone else grows a seedling and shares. many can also be purchased in the market for FV-cash. Level 2 trees usually give higher harvest yields than level 1 trees. See THIS PAGE for tree list by level. (available in your mastery list) See THIS PAGE for tree list with harvest yields (available in your market).
	Trees can be a very useful intermediate source of coin generation. You will need A LOT of trees of the right types to make tree farming useful for coin generation. It does take time to collect that many trees and build the many orchards you'll need to house them.
	Trees can be stored in an orchard. The orchard will hold up to 20 trees and can be harvested once every 2 days, regardless of the type of trees it holds. orchards are especially useful for trees that have a growing time longer than 2 days. Placing long-growth trees in an orchard allows you to harvest more often and master these trees that much faster.   Orchards may give you the level 2 seedlings of the trees you have in them If you want a lot of seedlings of one specific tree type, place ONE tree in 20 orchards, instead of 20 trees in one orchard. That increases your chance of getting a seedling 20 times. You cannot multiply level 1 trees this way. Seedlings will always be for the level 2 tree.   For trees with a 2-day growing time, orchards are only useful if you want seedlings from them. orchards do not speed up the growing time of these trees. If you have mastered those trees and don't want seedlings from them, better use you orchards for long-growing trees and for trees that you have not mastered yet.
	You can purchase and build one orchard at a time. You can place as many as you want. The orchard is available as a template. Building parts need to be added to complete it. (9 bricks, 10 nails, and 10 boards) You can ask your neighbors to send you the necessary building parts, but it is easier to just get them from the feeds or the special deliveries.
	There is no orchard upgrade available in the free game. The "super orchard" can be purchased for 60 FV-cash. The yield is 4x higher than the regular orchard: double the number of trees in the same space harvests daily instead of every other day. It's a waste of your money. The cow pasture with belted cows has better yield, and can be obtained with coins only. I see no purpose in spending real money on super orchards. The cost in real money is quite high for something that is ultimately only a virtual yield. Once you have maxed out on farm spread and building upgrades, you won't know what to do with your coins anyway. So why spend real money and make it worse?
	When harvesting the orchard, you will have a chance of finding Mystery Seedlings. Mystery seedlings can be planted on your farm and need to be watered 8 times to fully grow. You can receive Watering Cans as free gifts from Neighbors, from the facebook feeds, or from harvesting your own orchards.
	The mystery seedlings you find in your orchards will grow up to be derived from the trees in your orchard. If you keep only one kind of tree in your orchard, you know what seedlings you'll get. Check to see what seedlings your trees will produce. see also THIS PAGE Hover over the tree picture when you 'look inside' the orchard. level 1 trees (like lime trees) give different level 2 seedlings (like key lime trees), level 2 trees give their own seedlings.
	Mystery seedlings you get from the feeds can grow up to be a different tree than they came from.
	Harvesting the orchard and the trees on your farm will count towards Tree Mastery. You will receive a Tree Mastery Sign after achieving the third star.
	If you have many trees outside orchards, the arborist is very useful to harvest them all in one action. You can find arborists in the feeds or make them in your craft shop.
	Some trees can get you a better yield per space per time than calves, even without orchards (see below).

DO NOT BUY TREES from your market, ...

	Unless you want them for mastery points or for level 1 trees that you can't get otherwise, it's a waste of money. Zynga is cranking out so many new tree types so fast that it has become unrealistic to collect them all. Trying to keep up and collect all will cost you a lot of real money. Don't forget these are merely cartoons. You're not buying anything real! There are so many different tree types nowadays that you could not even place them all on a farm. If you have to stick them in orchards to place them, nobody will ever see them, so why bother...
	You can get a lot of trees for free from the feeds or as gifts. Take care of getting new neighbors and make them Facebook friends so you can see their feeds. It takes time to build orchards. Neighbors that post a lot of trees and seedlings are more advanced players (level 100 and up)
	Get the grown trees and mystery seedlings that are being shared on the Facebook feeds. Within  only a few days you'll have more trees than you can handle. You won't be able to keep up collecting the necessary watering cans or building orchards.

Calves or trees?

Calves and trees take up the same space = 1 dot-space. Calves give the highest yield/time/space (3.33 coins/hour/dotspace) for animals outside animal storage buildings that are accessible to the beginning player. The max crop yield (purple tomatoes) = 27.25 coins/crop plot with 16 dotspaces/crop plot = 1.70 coins/hour/dotspace. Of course, crops also give you XP which you cannot get from calves or trees. Calves and trees are both fairly easy to get from the feeds without cost. Early on, calves will probably give a higher coin yield per space per time than most of the trees you can access.   Some level 2 trees can get you a better yield per space per time than calves. If your goal is to get the highest yield per time per space, you might eventually want to switch to those higher-yield trees. See sorted list at bottom of this page. Level 1 trees give lower yield than calves. Some level 2 trees give better yields than calves, even without orchards (see below) A tree will need to yield >80 coins/day (=160 coins / tree harvest every other day = 3200 coins per harvest for full orchard) to produce better income than calves. Calves harvest every day. Trees harvest every 2 days in orchards. Many trees take longer if not in orchard (up to 5 days)

Orchard exploit:

An orchard does not reduce harvest readiness when you place additional trees in it.
This allows for 2 important exploits: maximize revenue and maximize mastery.

The process is very simple. Build as many orchards as you can and place only ONE tree in them so they count for harvest readiness. When all the orchards are ready for harvest, get to work as follows:

1. maximize revenue:

	Place 19 trees in a ready orchard.
	Harvest the orchard.
	Remove the 19 trees and place them in the next ready orchard.
	Because the azalea bonsai II tree is the tree with the highest harvest yield, (July 2012) this will allow you to harvest the maximum possible revenue for your orchards. (18,000 coins for each orchard with 20 azalea bonsai II trees.) Do this for 100 orchards and you'll harvest 1,800,000 coins in a single pass!
	This will also give you a lot of tree seedlings, that you can grow so you won't have to move so many trees next time around.

2. maximize tree mastery / seedling production.

	Place 19 (or as many as you have) trees of the kind you want to quick-master in a ready orchard.
	Harvest that one orchard.
	Remove the trees and place them in the next ready orchard.
	This will allow you to repeatedly harvest the same trees over and over again and collect mastery points for every orchard you place them in. With 100 ready orchards you can get 100 mastery points for a single tree x 19 trees = 1900 MP in one harvest. Most trees require only 450 MP for full mastery.
	This will also give you a lot of seedlings from the tree you use. Grow them if you have a lot to go for mastery so you can get there faster If low-yield trees, discard the seedlings. Sell off the grown trees as soon as you reach mastery. If you use the crafting shop, you may want to keep a few trees of each category so you can still get some crafts baskets from them.

Update March 2012:
Zynga released a number of new trees that give even higher yields than the peach palm tree.

The highest yield level 2 tree is Azalea Bonsai II with a 900 coin yield/harvest = almost double the peach palm tree.

Update July 2012: Blooms + the Bloom Garden:

The bloom garden is a building similar in purpose and function for blooms as the orchard for trees.

Differences + advantages of bloom garden vs. orchard:

1. The bloom garden template costs 0 (zero) coins to purchase, the orchard template costs 1,000 coins.
2. The bloom garden can be upgraded with building materials to hold 40 blooms.
   To upgrade the orchard, you have to pay FV-cash!
3. The tiger lily can be purchased for FV-coins and gives an even higher yield than Azalea Bonsai II.
   Since the bloom garden can hold 40 blooms, the bloom garden yield is 43,200 coins per harvest =  21.600 coins/day!

Conclusion:
Tree farming is really beyond the reach of beginning players. It takes a very long time to collect sufficient trees and build enough orchards to make a difference in game advancement.

More questions? 
Check out THIS PAGE for some more tree growing tips.

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Page last modified: August 01, 2012
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