Marianna's Garden
The sky has been overcast the last couple of weeks, and still little rain, so Mrs. Suzie has not had much to do in the garden of late. This has also been the case with her keen on gardening family, who, ever resourceful have taken to playing online games.
One of the wonders of online games is that they are not much fun on your own. Needless to say it was not long before Mrs. Suzie was roped in to play with them as well. Now while Mrs. Suzie has been a computer user for many years – she has not had to gain the skills required for gaming where the mouse can be used for things other than just double clicking, and where it does different things depending on which tool has been selected. These things are all very alien to Mrs. Suzie.
So, for about a week, I have been doing application support for ‘Garden Life‘ for Mrs. Suzie as she tackles creating a virtual garden. In the end rather than have to find out what she was trying to do and work out what was supposed to happen at every stage and try and guess the strategy, I installed the app and had a play. So for anyone who wants to play ‘Garden life‘, here are a few tips.
1. Get as much land under cultivation as possible. Buy garden extensions as soon as you have enough money. you should have enough diamonds to buy your first extension – don’t spend them on anything else.
2. Grow strawberries. Ken Muir and Mr. Wilkin are not the worlds biggest strawberry growers, you are! They crop in five minutes meaning that each plot of strawberries will net you 36 experience points and 36 golds per hour. Experience points get you up to the next level.
3. While your crops are growing look around some random gardens for stuff to pick up. Go for ones on lower levels – the things are easier to spot. If you see a gopher wait for the gopher to appear, don’t click on the empty hole!
4. Get some Facebook friends to play too. You can pick up a pot of gold from every friend every day, and send one another (very expensive) free gifts. Get your gold and send a free gift first thing in the morning.
5. Whenever you receive a gift send a thank you gift back (it is the same as you have received). If your friends do the same you will build up a big collection of useless stuff that you can turn into gold.
6. Plan your crops based on how long you will be away from the computer. If you will be on it constantly grow strawberries, if you are going to pop to the bathroom with a copy of ‘The Garden‘ for half an hour – plant some pansies instead. You do not want to leave your crops to wilt once they have cropped. Pumpkins are a good overnight crop, or tomatoes if you are having a lie in.
7. Get hedgehog and Bunny hutch bases so that you can make use of all the free stuff and have lots of animated bunnies and hedgehogs in your garden when you are sufficiently wealthy
It takes about a day to get to level 9, so you can have a sense of achievement at an early stage. Lots of gold and friends means that you can have a pretty garden and not just a functional one! It is very easy to be seduced into buying pretty things to make your garden look nice.
Suzie x
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