Floating Gardens - Gardening for Reagents Part 2

     Have you ever visited someone's home and run across a floating garden? You can actually float gardening plots and then plant on them which enables you to plant the equivolent of two or three large areas of plants in only one area - using only one gardening spell to care for all the layers.

I have seen some extreme gardeners with up to 6 layers of plants! I never quite mastered the floating garden to that extent because you also need to float the gardening spell somewhere around the third layer for it to actually affect all 6 layers and missing that small window can be very trying on my patience. So I went for just two layers and had some interesting findings.

Pros:

Ok, these are pretty obvious.

• Takes up less space in smaller yards.

• Takes less energy so you might actually have some left for pet training or even fishing - especially now that there are recipes that also require fish as ingredients.

• Gardening can take less of your time that you could be out there saving the Spiral. The floating garden is more time efficient not only because you are using fewer gardening spells over all, but you basically are harvesting two (or more) plots at once which saves you the time of running around your estate.

Cons:

These were discovered through many instances of trial and error.

• It requires a minimum of 30 crates to efficiently create a double layer of medium plots in a large area. That is a LOT of crates. Unless you farm Nightshade often and have kept all of your crates, you are going to be spending plenty of time in the bazaar just hunting for crates.

• Only the small plots are easy to arrange in layers. When using medium or large plots it is quite difficult to get the plots to stack correctly. It depends on which direction that your crates are facing as to where the plot will be placed on top of them.

•      It is really hard to replant seeds on the bottom layers. Especially if you have had some, but not all, of your plants elder and are trying to replant around fully mature plants.

• I suspect that when there is a collection of TOO much magic in one place, some very strange things can occur. Once I finally got my plots floating and stacks all nice and neatly arranged well within the parameters of my gardening spells for a large area, I noticed that sometimes things would disappear from my yard. At other times I would pick something up and put it in my backpack, only to find it right back where it had been when I returned to my house later. This, as you can imagine, is extremely frustrating.

     I do not claim to be an expert on gardening, but my personal opinion on the floating garden is Just Say NO! As far as I am concerned, the floating garden just is not worth the frustration and I will be plowing that top layer as soon as all of my plants have eldered.

     Some of these anomalies that I have encountered are actually kind of humorous, such as the King Parsley that now hangs out in my driveway.

However, when it became next to impossible to harvest my plants at all, this was more than just an annoying issue then. As I'm not entirely sure if the floating garden could be a violation of my lease in anyway, I'm hesitant to contact my landlord, KI Properties, for assistance.

     I did try asking my teacher, but Drake just looked down his nose at me before curling his lip in a snarl. While Professor Wu is my secondary teacher, I haven't had to go see her in ages, and doubted she even remembered me. I asked Terri, one of our castle residents who is a Life wizard, for advice. Neither she nor Professor Wu could offer any suggestions to fix my current issues, but Terri does have an idea that can help wizards produce gardens above and beyond their normal energy boundaries. Keep your eyes peeled for her gardening tips, coming soon.