Stardew Valley - Multi-Season Crops

These crops grow across more than one season, so a planting can keep producing after the season changes.

Overview

Most things planted in the valley belong to a single month and have to be sown again when the weather turns. A small handful carry on regardless, because their season list covers more than one month, and the plant simply keeps growing as the calendar rolls over. Four of them bridge Summer into Fall. One covers all three growing seasons, which means a single sowing can run from the first morning of Spring to the last evening of Fall without being touched again.

The practical gain is not only the saved seed money. A tile holding one of these plants also keeps its tilled soil and its fertiliser through the turn of the season, where an ordinary tile loses both overnight. That makes a border of them a quiet way of carrying expensive fertiliser forward, and the plant does not even have to have sprouted for the trick to work: seeds sitting in the ground count as a crop in progress.

Groups

Three of the five keep producing once they reach maturity, and those three are the reason the branch matters. Ancient fruit takes four weeks to come up and then swells a new fruit every seven days for as long as the ground stays warm. Corn needs a fortnight and then yields every four days, which over Summer and Fall adds up to a sizeable number of pickings from one planting. Tea leaves behave differently again: the bush produces nothing for three weeks of each month, then hands over one leaf a day through the final week of Spring, Summer and Fall.

The other two are picked once and cleared. A sunflower comes up in eight days and drops the bloom plus up to two fresh seeds, so a field of them roughly reseeds itself. Wheat is the fastest thing the branch grows, cut with a scythe rather than pulled by hand, and a good proportion of the swings also throw hay straight into the silo.

The Tea Bush is the odd one out. It goes in the way a sapling does, onto untilled ground or into a Garden Pot, and it never needs watering. It stands through Winter outdoors, so a row planted in Fall is already mature when Spring arrives, which is how farms turn tea into a hedge that earns money.

Order

Wheat is the first of these a farm meets, because its seeds are the cheapest on Pierre's shelves and four days is short enough to risk in a first Summer. Sunflowers follow in the same month, and corn is the one that asks for a real decision, since its seeds cost enough to hurt in a first year and the return only arrives in the back half of the following month.

The Tea Bush arrives through friendship rather than through a shop. Reaching two hearts with Caroline brings her sunroom scene, and the crafting recipe for the sapling comes in the post the morning afterwards. Anybody who would rather not wait can watch the travelling cart, which stocks a sapling occasionally, or trade for a batch at Caroline's stall during the Desert Festival.

Ancient fruit belongs to the far end of a run and arrives by a route nothing else uses. The artifact has to be dug, fished or looted first, and donating it to Gunther earns both a packet of seeds and the recipe that turns any further artifacts into more packets. From there the supply sustains itself, since one fruit dropped into a Seed Maker comes back as more seeds, and any other crop pushed through one has a small chance of producing Ancient Seeds instead of its own.

Best

Ancient fruit wins the branch outright and wins it by a wide margin. The raw fruit is worth more than anything else that grows outdoors, a keg multiplies it threefold, and ageing the wine in a cellar cask raises it further. Because the plant never needs replanting, a greenhouse given over to it becomes an income that costs nothing but the walk to collect it.

Corn is the practical pick for a working farm. One sowing on the first morning of Summer covers two whole months, so the labour per harvest is the lowest in the branch, and an Oil Maker turns the surplus into something worth considerably more than the vegetable.

Wheat is the volume play. Nothing else grows in four days, which makes it the crop for the awkward week at the end of a month and the crop a farm plants when it wants a hundred of something in a hurry. A keg turns it into beer and a mill turns it into flour, which is the only farm-grown way to keep a busy kitchen stocked.

Tea is the lowest effort of the five. The bush asks for nothing after planting and pays a leaf a day for a week every month, and pickled Tea Leaves are worth half again what the keg's Green Tea fetches.

Sunflowers come last on gold, and their case is made elsewhere: the seeds that fall out of a harvest mean the field renews itself, and the bloom presses into oil.

Uses

Corn is the one item of the five the Junimos ask for, and their autumn scroll wants it alongside the season's own vegetables, which is a reason to hold a few back before the kegs take the rest. The kitchen leans on this branch harder than the gift lists do: flour from wheat and oil from corn and sunflowers are the background ingredients behind a long list of dishes, and tortillas trace back to corn as well.

Prices

Judge these five on what a season of a single tile earns rather than on the price of one item. On that measure corn and Ancient Fruit are in a different class, because the tile keeps paying without further seed money.

The processing choice matters more here than usual. Wheat is cheap enough raw that the keg's beer is a large multiple of the grain, and corn is cheap enough that the Oil Maker is worth the wait. Ancient fruit is the reverse case: the fruit is already expensive, so only the keg and the cask are worth the delay.

Strategy

Treat the first morning of Summer as the planting date for the whole branch. Corn, sunflowers and wheat all run into Fall from there, and anything sown later simply loses pickings at the far end. A farm that plants corn on the first of Summer never has to think about it again until the frost.

Use the soil rule deliberately. A strip of wheat or sunflowers left standing through the last week of a month carries expensive fertiliser into the next one, and nothing is lost by picking the grain a day or two late.

Give the greenhouse to the plants that never stop. Ancient fruit inside glass ignores the calendar and keeps its weekly cycle for the rest of the save, and tea bushes planted along the border add a week of leaves every month without taking a growing tile.

Notes

Quality fertiliser improves only one item from a harvest that yields several at once, which quietly weakens it on corn and makes it almost pointless on a Tea Bush. The growth fertilisers have a matching limit: they shorten the wait for the first harvest and leave the regrowth cycle exactly as it was.

Ancient seeds refuse a Garden Pot outright, and the game answers an attempt with a line about roots that grow too deep to be happy in there.

All Multi-Season Crops

Each of these crops with its season, growth time and normal-quality sell price.

Crop	Image	Season	Growth	Price
Ancient Fruit		Spring, Summer, Fall	28 days	550g
Tea Leaves		Spring, Summer, Fall	20 days	-
Corn		Summer, Fall	14 days	50g
Sunflower		Summer, Fall	8 days	80g
Wheat		Summer, Fall	4 days	25g