Welcome to Elderfield Farming: Tools, Watering, Fertilizer

Three things decide how farming feels: tool tier, automated watering and fertilizer. All three have hard numbers, so you can upgrade on purpose instead of guessing.

Now the questions people ask most: what grows in winter, and whether higher-tier crops yield higher-tier preserves. Neither has a checkable answer yet. This page says so instead of guessing.

The four seasons

The game does not use spring, summer, autumn and winter. It uses four names with a religious flavour:

If a guide says “Death season,” it means winter, not an event. Seasons affect crops, fishing and how busy the town is.

Tool tiers

Hoes and watering cans both come in four tiers. The range jumps, it does not grow one tile at a time.

The Gardening Hoe has exactly the same ranges: 1 / 3 / 5 / 8 tiles. The scythe climbs through Scythe Lv1 to Lv5.

Upgrade the hoe and the watering can first. They decide how many plots you get through in a day. The scythe only decides how fast grass disappears.

Farming levels matter too: each level adds 1% crop growth. One level looks small, but it applies across the board, so it pays off more than a one-off purchase over a long save.

Skip daily watering: Offerings of Rain

If watering every morning has worn thin, the game offers a ritual shortcut. Craft an Offering of Rain at the Witching Mortar, drop it into a Ritual Brazier, and your crops water themselves for days.

The Greater version covers most of a season. Set one down before a long mining trip or a story push and the “be home by evening to water” obligation disappears.

Choosing a fertilizer

Fertilizers split into two lines that do completely different things. Do not mix them up.

One rule to remember: you can fertilize empty plots or planted ones, and the highest-tier fertilizer in your bag is consumed first. If you want to save the good stuff, drop it in storage before you fertilize.

Scarecrows and bee houses

The Ragged Scarecrow is the anti-crow structure.

A player on the forum asked specifically whether a fully upgraded scarecrow still fails to keep crows away. So far there is a question and no solid answer. Bee houses are the same story: discussion, no numbers on the honey cycle.

Treat both as working, with an unconfirmed coverage range.

Still unconfirmed

• What grows in winter (Death season). Someone posted “Winter Crops” on the forum, which tells you nobody has answered it yet. This page does not publish a winter crop list.
• Whether higher-tier crops produce higher-tier preserves. Again, a question with no answer.
• The scarecrow’s actual coverage and the bee house production cycle have no published values.

All three are gaps where people ask and nobody answers. If you test one in your own save, it is worth posting, so it turns from a question into an answer.

What v1.0.1 changed on the farm

The v1.0.1 patch on 2026-09-18 improved several things:

• Multi-tile hoeing and watering are twice as fast. Outside the four tool tiers, this is the biggest quality-of-life jump.
• Fixed flower beds and special plots “eating” the seeds you had selected.
• Preserving Barrel, Keg, Furnace and Grinder cost less to make.
• Bad mining and gathering outcomes were cut in half, which also makes collecting material drops less punishing.

Related pages

Materials and special items are their own page. Mine output and mining risk are on the mines guide. Spiritwood has its own page.