Stardew Valley - Spring Crops

Spring crops are planted and harvested in spring. They die when summer begins.

Overview

Spring is the season a save begins in, and its twelve plants are the ones a farmer learns the soil with. Money is tight, the backpack is small, and the watering can holds forty charges, so the branch is built around cheap seeds that finish quickly rather than around anything grand. Almost every one of these plants pays back its seed inside a week, which is exactly what a farm with no barn, no kegs and no bus fare needs.

The branch is also the only one that has to be met twice before it makes sense. A first Spring sees roughly half of it: Pierre stocks the parsnips, potatoes, cauliflowers, beans, kale, tulips and jazz flowers, and that is the whole shop until a second year adds garlic. The other half sits behind progress made elsewhere. Rhubarb comes off Sandy's shelf at the Oasis, which means the bus has to be running first. Strawberry seeds appear at one festival stall on the thirteenth and nowhere else all year. Carrot seeds are dug out of seed spots, traded from the raccoon family in the Secret Woods, or shaken out of mystery boxes and golden treasure chests, and only between the back of Winter and the twenty-third of Spring.

The first morning of Summer kills whatever is still standing, which gives the season its shape. The long crops have to be sown in the first fortnight, the four-day crops can be turned over right to the end, and anything planted after the twentieth is a gamble on the calendar rather than a plan.

Groups

Seven of the twelve are picked once and clear the tile. Parsnips, garlic and carrots are the quick ones, finishing in three or four days and leaving room for several rounds. Potatoes and kale sit in the middle. Cauliflower and rhubarb are the slow pair, and both ask for nearly a fortnight, which makes the first week of Spring their only safe planting window.

Two keep producing after the first picking. A bean plant climbs a trellis, takes ten days to mature, and then hands over a bean every three days until the frost, so the tile is never hoed again. Strawberries take eight days and then fruit every four, and they are the one plant in the branch that earns like a Summer crop.

Two are flowers rather than food, and their value is in what the bees do with them. A tulip or a Blue Jazz standing within five tiles of a Bee House changes what that house produces, and the jazz flower lifts a jar of honey to twice the plain price while the tulip lifts it rather less. Both are grown in rows beside the hives rather than for the bloom itself.

The last one is rice, which behaves unlike anything else on the farm. A Rice Shoot planted within three tiles of standing water counts as irrigated, matures two days early, and never needs the watering can at all. A pond-side strip of rice is therefore the only field in Spring that looks after itself.

Order

The first morning decides most of the season. Parsnips and potatoes go in because they are affordable, and cauliflower goes in because twelve days of growth leaves no slack later. Setting the cauliflowers in nine-tile squares costs nothing, and every square then gets a nightly roll at becoming one huge plant.

The thirteenth is the date to clear the diary for. The festival stall sells Strawberry Seeds and nothing else does, the day ends with the farmer back home at ten in the evening, and the ground can still be planted that night. A patch hoed, fertilised and watered before leaving for town turns that late evening into a full extra picking, which is worth more than anything else bought in the valley that month.

The twenty-fourth is the other fixed point, and it takes nothing from the field, so the back half of the month belongs to the quick crops. Garlic, once a second year opens it, slots into those gaps better than anything else at four days a round.

Rhubarb and carrots arrive from outside the shop and change the season's maths when they do. A farm with the bus running plants rhubarb on the first morning; a farm with a few Carrot Seeds in a chest has the fastest crop in the branch and the cheapest, because those seeds are never bought with gold.

Best

Measured as gold a day with no fertiliser and no profession bonus, the carrot leads the branch at a little over eleven, purely because its seeds cost nothing and three days is a very short wait. The catch is supply: a farm with ten Carrot Seeds has a wonderful crop and a farm with none cannot buy any.

Strawberries are the real answer for a farm that has seen one Spring already. Sown on the first morning of a later year, they clear roughly twenty gold a day per tile and keep a Seed Maker stocked for every year afterwards. Running a few berries through a Seed Maker in Summer is the standard way to break the festival's monopoly for good.

Below those two the order is rhubarb, cauliflower, bean, kale, then garlic and potato level with each other. Rhubarb is the best thing a first-year farm can bring back from the desert, since each root sells for several times its seed. Kale and potato are the honest middle, and potatoes sometimes hand over a second tuber from one plant depending on the day's luck, which quietly improves their standing.

The flowers come last on gold and should be judged on the honey instead. Rice loses money sold raw and only makes sense milled, which turns each grain into something worth twice as much and supplies a kitchen all year.

Uses

The Junimos want four of this branch for the Pantry's Spring scroll: a parsnip, a Green Bean, a cauliflower and a potato. The quality scroll in the same room takes five gold-grade parsnips, and a remixed save may ask for cauliflowers, beans or potatoes at that grade instead, so the first gold-starred vegetables of the year are worth setting aside rather than shipping.

The kitchen leans on the season heavily. A potato makes hashbrowns, a parsnip turns an omelette into the dish that boosts farming, and Parsnip Soup is one of the first recipes a farmer is taught. Cauliflower and cheese make a solid energy dish, beans make a hotpot, and kale goes into both a Stir Fry and a Salmon Dinner. Garlic is the branch's quiet workhorse: it is behind escargot, Fiddlehead Risotto and the Oil of Garlic that keeps monsters off a farmer in the mines. Rhubarb makes a pie worth considerably more than the stalk. A Blue Jazz, a Sea Cucumber and a tortilla together make the dish that raises luck.

Two plants have jobs nothing else covers. A carrot fed to the horse makes it quicker for the rest of the day, which is the cheapest travel upgrade in the game. A mill fed one grain of rice hands back milled rice overnight, which the kitchen wants in quantity.

Haley's dye pots and Emily's spool accept this branch too, with the carrot giving orange and rhubarb giving red.

Prices

The processing choice splits neatly along the fruit and vegetable line. Rhubarb and strawberries are fruit, so a keg turns them into wine worth three times the raw price, and a cask lifts that again. The vegetables belong in preserves jars, where the flat bonus matters more than a multiplier on a cheap item, and a jar of cauliflower pickles is worth more than twice the vegetable.

Flowers are the exception that proves the rule. A tulip is nearly worthless sold raw and perfectly good as wine, which is why a row of them beside a few kegs outperforms a row of them beside the shipping bin.

Strategy

Treat the first Spring as a season for levels rather than for money. Every harvest pays farming experience, the long crops pay the most of it, and the levels bought in Spring are what open the kegs, jars and sprinklers that make the rest of the year profitable.

Prepare the ground before the shop run, not after it. Opened soil can be fertilised and sown for free, and the fertiliser has to go in first, which is the single most common waste of a morning in this branch.

Keep a few of everything out of the bin. One parsnip, one bean, one cauliflower and one potato close the Pantry's scroll, and a gold-grade example of each closes the next one, while Pam loves a parsnip and Maru loves a cauliflower, so the same handful buys goodwill at the same time.

Notes

Kale and rice answer the scythe instead of the hand, so a farmer clearing the field with a swing finds the crop already collected.

Garlic is a poor present despite being good food: Evelyn and Pierre both dislike receiving it, and most of the valley merely tolerates it.

Evelyn loves a tulip, and Demetrius and Maru both love a strawberry, which makes the two prettiest things in the branch worth more as birthday presents than as sales.

The statue that can stand in the farmhouse produces a single parsnip each year on the eighteenth of Spring, which is Pam's birthday, and she loves it.

All Spring Crops

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

Crop	Image	Season	Growth	Price
Blue Jazz		Spring	7 days	50g
Carrot		Spring	3 days	35g
Cauliflower		Spring	12 days	175g
Garlic		Spring	4 days	60g
Green Bean		Spring	10 days	40g
Kale		Spring	6 days	110g
Parsnip		Spring	4 days	35g
Potato		Spring	6 days	80g
Rhubarb		Spring	13 days	220g
Strawberry		Spring	8 days	120g
Tulip		Spring	6 days	30g
Unmilled Rice		Spring	-	-